The Mountain by Donald F. Drummond, and: Graves Registry and Other Poems by Keith Wilson, and: Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts I & II by Thomas McGrath (review)

Reviews 65 strong pulse. Frank Waters, perhaps more openly than any other Western novelist, has tuned his work to this rhythm. T h o m a s J. L y o n , Utah State University The Mountain. By Donald F. Drummond. (Chicago: The Swallow Press, Inc., 1971. 63 pages, $5.00.) Graves Registry and Other Poems. By Keith Wilson. (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1969. 95 pages, paperback, $1.95.) Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts I if II. By Thomas McGrath. (Chicago: The Swallow Press, Inc., 1970. 214 pages, $8.50.) That good man Albert J. Nock once said that a book “should be judged on the scale of its major qualities,” which is excellent advice but not as simple as it seems at first blush. Here is the middle stanza of three com­ prising “Oh, Ye Laurels,” the final poem in The Mountain: So brief the image, like a motion picture It flickers on the cortex and is gone; But better feel the lips than fix the stricture Of what the mind alone can carry on; And if the mind is strictly fixed, its fixture Tim e leaves you sad, one arm upon the lawn. What is the speaker talking about? This stanza is of course out of context, but even in context, the reader does not care; he is sidetrackedand humor­ ously horrified at how phonetics and the pseudo-exigencies of ryme have carried the speaker off whatever point he may have had. Too often Drum­ mond can’t resist this sort of thing. In "Ineffable,” he asks, “The death of feeling, is it a bowl of pain/O r is it mud, bud?” The reader winces at such playful compulsions and wonders how the person who wrote such stuff could be the poet who wrote the powerful, accomplished poems in the same book. The Mountain concerns itself mainly with subjects such as growing through middle age, the difficulties of achieving excellence, and death. “A Day, A Decade,” one of the finest poems in the book, begins, “After his class he found he had the shakes,” then proceeds to meditate on the in­ adequacies of lecturing, daily minutiae, and marital love— however “comfort­ ing.” And he finds himself "seeking an awesome ocean,” on which he synthesizes Ahab, John the Baptist, and Jonah in a fully realized imaginative vision which ends with the beautiful lines: Thus the vast solitude of the great sea,/Perhaps to see a burning bush upon it,/Upon the sea.” Now that brings a lot of tilings together, and does it so movingly, so artistically, so inevitably, that the reader knows he is in the presence of quality. 66 Western American Literature That authentic emotional quality, a man really speaking to men, is present also in "Then, I’ll Tell You,” where Drummond is talking, whitehot , among other things, about what he is doing: “Two or three times in an average life you see/Your guts in print . . Drummond, for the past twenty-four years a Professor of English at the University of Missouri, was raised in Wyoming and Colorado, and many of his settings, much of his imagery, partake of the West. He has a fine elegy on Winfield Townley Scott in The Mountain, an epigram ("Kid”) on the natural ingratitude of children which can stand beside the best of J. V. Cunningham, and other good work. One wishes to quote extensively from this book, Drummond’s sixth collection. However, to close, here are the final lines from the moving elegy on the poet’s late, great friend and publish­ er, Alan Swallow, “Alan” : I see you in the blue sage of Wyoming Behind the tricky wheel of an XKE. The lonely miles from Rawlins up through Three Forks, With ground snow blowing, blowing through you and me. Close as my closest brother. I mourn me. Keith Wilson is a New Mexico poet, born and bred, and in his fourth book, Graves Registry, most of his best poems draw on the land and the people he knows best. And yet maybe that’s not the way to say it—that makes him sound as if he were a “regional” poet, which in the...