Lowbrow Contours

Robinson continuedfrom previous page thoroughly. The straggle inside the work is most openly disclosed here. The third part of the book, The Book ofCraving , takes a more narrative form. I was reminded in some ways of Eleni Sikelianos's The Book ofJon (2004), which alsoemploys varying formal strategies for approaching difficult autobiographical material. As with Sikelianos's book, a more straightforward "story" can prove a relief, a way for readers to get oriented within the layers of image and affect. Still more, The Book ofCraving owes something to Lyn Hejinian's My Life (1980, 1987). Not that Rodney is using Hejinian's strict formal grid, but like Hejinian , she embeds narrative in lyric patterning, with a number of phrases weaving in and out of the material in slightly altered articulations. Again, I feel the material could have functioned more sinuously if it were edited down. Overall, though, this section has a pleasing effect and offers, by way ofits formal shape, a sense of solidity and anchoring. Rodney sews past and present into a substantial garment as she "write[s] things down as they float up, transformed by changing context." It's a shadowy world that this book is grappling with; it's haunted, and we are fools if we don't realize that ghosts can sometimes be tedious. Rodney's ghosts are no exception, but when she sets herself to the task of wrestling them down, we see that she has considerable strength. In Rodney's hands, we discover that language can take new shapes. Even though "[w]hat dies is a structure, an old way of being," we are equally reassured that "[w]hat seems to be the surface is actually a composite of varying depths of perception, opening a galaxy of song." Elizabeth Robinson is the author of seven books ofpoetry, and a coeditor of 26 Magazine and EtherDome Chapbooks. Her most recent book is T (Apogee). Lowbrow Contours Jim Feast The Moss Gatherers Matt Briggs StringTown Press http://home.earthlink.net/~stringtown 206 pages; paper $14.00 Let's think about audience—specifically, how the audience for a small press writer such as Matt Briggs, whose short story collection The Moss Gatherers is on review here, differs from the audience for a writer such as Carolyn Chute, who is firmly in the mainstream. I am using Chute for the comparison simply because she shares with Briggs a deep sympathy for those on the lower fringe of society, a flavorful, comic tone, and the ability to create characters who stay indelibly strong in the reader's mind long after closing her book. Since I don't have any demographic statistics, I will assume that fundamental differences in the two authors' attitudes toward their similar material is reflective of attitudes with which their separate audiences would feel most comfortable. Basically, the one obvious difference is in the authors' view of fatefulness. Take Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985), where, it will be recalled, Earlene, the demi-heroine, who begins by despising the ragtag, brawling, rabbit-proliferating Bean clan, through a series of comic-pathetic catastrophes, first marries Beal Bean, who is disposed ofin a hale ofpolice bullets, then ends up shacked up with the clan paterfamilias, Reuben, the county's omeriest , most law-despising son of a bitch. Over the whole book, there is an aura of Greek inevitability, not unlike (to broaden our reference in the American tradition ) that found in Reynolds Price's magnificent A Long and Happy Life (1957). This is another book about a woman's foreordained marriage, though instead of the rambunctious, dyspeptic style of Chute, Price adopts a measured prose and ties the fatefulness of the plot to the ongoing rhythms of nature. However, there is a contrasting tradition available here, that of Welty and Faulkner, in which the unavoidable restrictions in poor people's lives is balanced against their abilities to escape, at minimum , the psychological deficits, such as inferiority complexes and self destructive behavior, usually associated with the impoverished. Briggs belongs to this second school of writing insofar as his characters always have me possibility of transcending features of their circumstances. For instance, in his "Reverse Order," a marvel...