A Hive of Souls: Selected Poems 1968-1976 (review)

112 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW lulling as an alibi Scrap Book has good poems in it and I'm glad Scully chose to collect them. At the same time, it is clearly not a way forward from Santiago Poems. Recently Scully has been translating Quecha poetry, which I think is a way forward, but I look for the day when he turns his large gifts directly on our own situation. Roger Mitchell James Hazard, A Hive ofSouls: Selected Poems 1968-1976. The Crossing Press (Trumansburg, N.Y. 14886), 1977. $3.95. Most people reared elsewhere imagine the Middle West as a great blank space separating the Appalachian Mountains from the Rockies, a source of pigs and corn and conservative politics. For James Hazard, who has spent most of his days, as he tells us, within "a child's walking distance from Lake Michigan-in Indiana, Illinois, and now Wisconsin," the Middle West is a region layered rich with topsoil and intricately scoured by glaciers, a region dense with the shades of Indians and felled trees, a land bearing the marks of human labor. Although he lives in Milwaukee, Hazard seems less a poet of cities than of countryside . The human surface, the veneer of civilization, much as he honors it, appears thin and brittle in his eyes. In a supermarket, that bastion of commerce, he senses alien vibrations: Think of it: there is earth below this tile floor! And (how can I know this?) a patient Indian is buried there. And day by day his dust in the dust of his burial canoe gathers itself slowly (how do I know this?) back to its original self, gathers itself slowly towards a time when the reborn buffalo will walk a new green land, hunterless and growing over the bones and dust of traveling salesmen and their super markets and all their Chicagos. Even though we realize that buffaloes and Indians will never again rule the prairies, we are reminded by Hazard of our newcomers' status, our historicity. Images throughout his poetry will recall the primitive forces lurking just behind the cultivated surfaces of his Middle West: the menacing sturgeon beneath the ice of Lake Winnebago, the stinking luxuriant muck drawn up with the anchor, the blizzard and buffalo and glacier all ready to stampede. When "the anchor came up covered with muck," he says, My hands were covered with it, my hands smelling like the roots of things that come up 113 REVIEWS again after the long-gone death of sunken sun fishes. The "roots of things" literally finger down into the soil beneath the supermarket floor, metaphorically into the life of the body and into the wilderness past. That awareness of nature as the ground out of which all strictly human life springs is a hallmark of Midwestern writing, whether you skip back two generations to figures such as Carl Sandburg and Willa Cather, or look to contemporaries such as Wright Morris and Wendell Berry. So here is one response to Henry James's famous lament that the veneer of civilization was too thin in America for poor Hawthorne, or for any other writer, to make great art: there is an art less encumbered with the literary past, less entangled in social codes, less deluded about our lease of life on this planet. There is an art, Hazard reminds us, closer to everyday lives and ordinary speech. He describes his poems as "scripts," meant for reading aloud, and in that respect as well he resembles those earlier Midwestern poets, such as Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, who performed their works for decades throughout the country, before audiences both lettered and unlettered . Without making any bones about rejecting the elitist, European-oriented current in modern American poetry, he takes his place in the populist tradition that stems from Whitman. His affinities among contemporary poets would include Robert BIy, in neighboring Minnesota, and Gary Snyder, both of them speaking to us in spare lines of common speech. A poem that Hazard opens with a line from Snyder concludes with the following proclamation: It is an ordinary thing to be holy. We do such extraordinary things not to be. In his search for wonder-for...