Running Lights, and: Walking Home from the Icehouse, and: Love Is Not a Consolation; It Is a Light (review)

reviews 177 tastic components of human Ufe, will not defeat domination, but only vacate the field" (297). I cannot imagine a more forceful argument for the study of sexuality, for beginning seriously to probe the sources of our sexual pain—a pain that is palpable throughout the volume. I have skimmed the surface ofwhat it contains, neglecting many important articles and totally neglecting to comment on the power, poignancy, and relevance of the fiction and poetry interspersed among the essays. For aU these omissions, I apologize. The only way to do justice to this book is to read it Onelast word: I hope it is clear why Myths seems conventional and pales in comparison to Powers. If it is our purpose to produce radicaUy subversive forms of understanding in order to transcend oursdves and our situation, the contributors to Powers have Ut our path with a torch. DORICE TENTCHOFF Notes Oayle Rubin suggests that we look for the ultimate locusofwomen's oppressionin systems of marriage exchange rather than in the exchange of commodities. In this view, the subjugation of women pre-dates the emergence of class and is virtuaUy coterminous with the emergence of homo sapiens. See Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Rapp (New York, N.Y.: Monthly Review Press, 1975). Henry CarUle. RunningLights. Port Townsend, Washington: Dragon Gate, Inc., 1981. 66 pp. $5 (paper); $9 (doth). Vern Rutsala. Walking Homefrom the Icehouse. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1981. 74 pp. $4.95 (paper); $12.95 (doth). Primus St. John. Love Is Not a Consolation; It Is a Light. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1982. 75 pp. $5.95 (paper); $12.95 (doth). Much has been written about regional sympathies in contemporary poetry. There is little general agreement about whether or not they exist; and, given that they might exist, there is not any agreement about what they might mean. But, if a look at these three writers tdls us anything about it, we have to say that to Uve and write in and ofthe Parific Northwest is to write a poetry of content rather than artifice. Henry Carlile's second book, Running Lights, is the sort of mixture of memory and speculation that produces a sense of almost conspiratorial intimacy, not only bdween the speaker and his readers, but often between the speaker and other figures in the poems. For instance, in "My Father," I have to remember you and I can't. I caU you shadow or sand. No portrait or photo can keep you, not even an old shirt or a shoe that a dog might Ue down by. Throughout the book, poems spiral back to intimate and unified connections and to the forces which both inform and threaten them: Men change. Not that much, you would add. Uke a photgraph, something is retained which belongs to time and puUs us apart. ("The Camera") 178 the minnesota review And the mdaphors which contain these attachments spiral back, too. Hunting, fishing, photography, the wildness (the strangeness) of the natural world; all are brought again and again through the circle of intimacy. Life is tidal; the best and worst of it comes and goes and comes again. Once we sd the dead adrift with a few provisions they never came back. But once we found the spUnter of a huU lodged between rocks and said that was Sigurd's boat. ("Running Lights") EventuaUy we drown. Or, Uke the buU elk, we become the food ofinscrutable accidents; or, like the photograph, we yeUow and blur and forgd who snapped the shutter, who struck the pose. This seems Uke the kind of modernist precept most readers of poetry are famiUar with. But there is a singularity in CarlUe's work which beUes the general, the sdf-indulgent, the atomized and capitalist wretchedness implied by much work that is derivative of high modernism. "Once," the poet says, over and over; just once this happened and I weigh it and value it because the only human product is process, experience: Once the pheasant shone Kke jewelry. Now there is only this feather. Once that woman rose...