One Way to Reconstruct the Scene (review)

160ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW facts sparingly but convincingly, stressing, for instance, the importance of the greater interest in dramatic literature in the South than in New England, and the significance of the near-ubiquity of poetry in book collections. This volume in itself, however, is more valuable for the information it supplies than for its interpretations. It should, perhaps, be read along with Davis' Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1588-1763, which offers a broader, more interpretive view of the regional cultural milieu. For the student — even the casual student — of Colonial American literature, though, this small book is a source of tidbit after tantalizing tidbit: how much might be explained by the fact that Hudibras was the Colonial South's favorite seventeenth-century poetry, and Milton's epics thesecond favorite? Or that Cato was frequently read and even produced? Or that, until 1800, Burns and Dr. Johnson were uncommon in southern libraries? For the reader who, like Shaw, is becoming daily less interested in theory and more interested in information , this book is a collection of small treasures. The book is part of the Lamar Memorial Lecture series of Mercer University; its original presentation in lecture form rather than print may explain the otherwise surprising absence of bibliography and notes, a lack that will limit the book's usefulness to scholars bent on adding to the cultural-historical facts Davis gives. The detailed index partially compensates for the other missing scholarly tools, and the book as a whole is well worth the Americanist's time. JULIA WHITSITT, Texas Tech University William Virgil Davis. One Way to Reconstruct the Scene. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. 62p. William Virgil Davis's first book. One Way to Reconstruct the Scene — the latest, and seventy-fifth, installment in the Yale Series of Younger Poets — is a deeply disappointing collection. This is not to say it is bad. Bad books seldom have the power to disappoint because they give us nothing to hope for in the first place. Davis is a marvelously competent writer: and, strange to say, that is part of the problem. Again and again, poems in One Way to Reconstruct the Scene promise much. Davis has all the moves. He chooses to write about things of resonance, significance. He knows how to create an aura of mystery and tone of authority. Again and again, the aura turns out to be a trick of light done with mirrors, the authoritative tone a tinny soprano amplified by a megaphone. Significance becomes a matter of technique , not of conviction. Consequently, very few of these poems manage to deliver what they promise. The main symptom of Davis's bondage to stylish (read safe) technical devices is the way so many of the poems shut themselves down, cut themselves off, with a flashy but hollow final image. "The Sleep of the Insomniac" is a typical example. "The body beside your body sleeps like death," this poem begins: and ifinsomnia has become an almost obligatory theme of the magazine poem in thelast twenty years, it is still a situation that is painful enough to be interesting. The first line of this poem promises exploration of felt connections that are genuinely important. What Davis in fact delivers is not exploration: he simply gives us twelve more lines that carry us nowhere, and ends up by telling us, "Stars fasten to your forehead." This ending is neat, surely. It has the ring of finality — so much so that the poem can go no farther. It appears to be technically unassailable: nothing is wrong with it, really — except that it doesn't mean anything. It nods to the psychomysticism BOOK REVIEWS161 commonly accorded death and darkness as subject matter, then moves on. Above all, it is a convenient way out of the poem, both for reader and writer. We have a neatly portentous image — we need no longer think about this. Davis's tendency to shut poems down in patently safe ways accounts, I think, for the slightness of most of the pieces in this collection. Consider the closing lines of "The Ring Tree": "While/I watch, remembering, the ring tree shifts/in the dimmed light and I see...