Earth to Heaven

162 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW Felipe, Hernandez, Neruda, Vallejo, Campbell, MacDiarmid, Auden, Spender, Rukeyser , Becher, Eluard, Tikhonov, and Braccialarghe. Her discussions of the poems, however , are lame: she is of the plot outline school and given to quoting large swatches of poems that the reader has just read; she is also master of the obvious (in Neruda's Explico Algunas Cosas, "The olive oil is integral to Spanish cuisine") and a novice at editing -for each poet, she tells us what she's going to tell us, tells us, and then tells us what she told us. She includes a long chapter on the major English language poems, and in comparison to Tolley's chapter, "Spain," her ineptness is embarassing. She lacks his awareness of background, his feel for verse and confidence ofjudgment-in 103 pages she says less and says it less well than he does in 21 . Poetry and the Spanish Civil War is a sad performance and it discredits that already shakey genre, Literary History. In Rosenthal's, as well as Tolley's book, the critic becomes capitalist entrepreneur, far more important than the poets and the poetry. Rosenthal's enterprise is more modest than Tolley's. She merely wants to flog her Ph.D. dissertation, whereas he wants a seat on the Literary Stock Exchange. If she cared more for the poetry of the Spanish Civil War, she would try to bring out an inexpensive paperback anthology instead of this puffed-up $15 hardback. If Tolley cared more for the poetry and less for his judgments of it, he might publish his bibliography and let the reader go directly to Robin Skelton's anthology, The Poetry of the Thirties (Penguin). Capitalism, not poetry, triumphs in these books. Murray Sperber EARTH TO HEAVEN review of Carolyn M. Rodgers, How 1 Got Ovah. Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975. Until the last 20 pages of her book, Carolyn Rodgers' poems are edgy, impassioned occasions of struggle. Specifically they're the poems of a black woman outgrowing and shedding the ideological exoskeletons she has been holed-up in. The concluding poems are by the same woman-but nostalgic now, anxious to celebrate her joy in writing and her heightened appreciation of common decency-going back into the tradition (as she imagines it) of apolitical humanity and religious faith which is manifest in the history of her people and the example of her mother. The heritage she chooses to praise is embodied in "old wise men," symbolized by "rocks/in this weary land," rather than the heritage of insurrection and revolt. Her final poems are those of one who, having gone through callow forms of rebellion, has given up on revolution itself. How 1 Got Ovah, then, is not offered as a collection of discrete poems but as a pilgrim's progress, the record of a homecoming. There can be no doubt about the integrity and extraordinary power of individual poems. The question is whether her self-claimed progress is real or illusory-not only according to external criteria, but by the standards she herself establishes in the course of 'getting over.' The most convincing and provocative poems start at the boiling point which Morawski, among others, has identified as "the contradiction which repeatedly asserts itself between settled ideology and the attitudes which individuals freshly discover in assessing the human social and natural situation." Such eye-opening moments may or may not be expressly political. In "for sapphires" her seemingly realistic image of her mother ("wrinkles around/the tight mouth, stiff/factory used fingers/uh yellow skin,/ begun to fade") is exposed as limited, inadequate, by the fact that "daddy calls mama 'suga'/and uh beacon is behind his eyes. . ." But political or not, the dynamics of confrontation and realization are the same. In these poems life is a cauldron in which ideology, or false consciousness, evaporates.' Though the actual process may be less REVIEWS 163 objective than this implies. At times Rodgers seems to be on a reactive campaign against any and every kind of propaganda: hip street, black anti-black, black nationalist , hammerheaded 'radical,' white racist bourgeois, bourgeois feminist, and so on. What makes the struggle authentic, more than an exercise...