Between Angels, and: The Pomegranate Tree Speaks from the Dictator's Garden (review)

130 the minnesota review on the new field of publishing; but that does not cover the whole picture. Many middle class writers published, and many were far more successful in appealing to and shaping middle class sentiment, feeling and identity. Those intellectuals like Eliot did win the battles about education, however, and became eventually institutionalized in the school systems. A discussion of the specific power interests—within the middle class—that supported, financed and organized these schools would have greatly enriched Cottom's overall discussion. As it is, this reader finds it difficult simply to accept that Eliot's discourse had this amazing power to shape subjectivity—especially since she had a very small readership. What interests does her writing support and how did they insure that her ideas were disseminated and perpetuated? In this sense, though Cottom's discussion avowedly leans on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Cottom omits the connection between discursive formations and specific social interests and groups. Finally, it seems to this reader that the real subject of Cottom's book is a different way of writing "history" or criticism. I suppose some would see this element as a strength; however, I find it a weakness. What Stanley Aronowitz has said about Foucault applies here to Cottom: "he produces nothing other than a revolution in both the writing of history and cultural criticism" (7"Ae Crisis in Historical Materialism 319). Moreover, Cottom fills his book with constant interludes in which he seeks to reiterate and justify the nature and importance of his project. In these interludes, as in his Conclusion, his target is "the easeful arrogance" (213) of intellectuals who read literature in the traditional humanist mode of the New Critics. Cottom's interludes alienate those "intellectuals" seeking to remember and highlight relationships between universities and other sites of struggle. The reader on this side of post-structuralism, especially post-structuralist Marxism, often feels that points get belabored elaboration and unnecessary repetition. We do not need the lectures. We already agree: "Literature does not come to us in isolation from the historical world. The idea that it is isolated can only be a political statement with a significance determined by the conditions in which it is made, disseminated, and interpreted" (209). What we would like are more materialist discussions about the very systems of power—discursive, institutional , economic and political—that have initiated, supported and perpetuated various ideologies. KEVIN RAILEY Between Angels by Stephen Dunn. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989. pp. 111. $7.95 (paper). The Pomegranate Tree Speaksfrom the Dictator's Garden by J. P. White. Stevens Point, Wisconsin: Holy Cow! Press, 1988. pp. 128. $14.00 (cloth), $8.95 (paper). "One person's wisdom is likely another's old baggage." —Stephen Dunn A face value understanding of the above statement would require many readers of Stephen Dunn's latest book to dust off more than a few pieces of their old Samsonite. Dunn's poetry attempts to find a home for the abstract in a genre that in the twentieth century has been colonized by the image. The risk that he takes in Between Angels is to patronize his readers with a tone that sometimes borders on the didactic and the glib. In a recent essay, "Walking Light: Some Reflections On The Abstract and The Wise," Dunn asserts that poets can get away with abstractions (which he equates with "wisdom lines") once they have established a believable emotional climate for their poem. He claims that when wisdom is "discovered" in the process [of the poem] it is not didactic, and therefore has more credibility with the reader (75). My difficulty with this equation is that "process" in Dunn's poems too often resembles a formula for facile poetic ambiguity and a kind of linguistic posturing that isn't interesting enough to care about. The first section of the book is ironically titled "Leavings"; ironic, because the title signifies an act Dunn's characters can never complete. Though aware, often hyper-aware, of his own position in relation to society, the speaker of these poems finds solace in his paradoxical desire both to leave and to remain in his current circumstances. The title...