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Reviews 281 reveals their inferiority to his, Indian, understanding of life originating in belief. Indian visions beat TV visions, the tale itself dramatizing the superiority. The two brief opening stories, of a veteran who raises an enormous sign over a gas station he may or may not own, and the monologue of a young girl, widowed by war, leaving her home village to take a job with the Indian agency, are slight but poignantly elegant. Both unselfconsciously affiliate with traditional oral narratives in their directness, especially in ignoring analysis of motive, and in their unostentatious revelation of how personality is defined through human relationships. The last story, “Some­ thing’s Going On,” the most ambitious and complex, is slightly flawed. I feel the central narrative within the interior of the story is still in process, and that Ortiz will improve it as he “retells” it. But “Something’s Going On” compellingly dramatizes the trials and courage of the family of a vet­ eran who has lost a leg in combat. Events are seen through the eyes of his young son, a device not always handled smoothly: one is aware at times of viewpoint exploited for expository purposes. But the evolution of the youngster’s feelings effectively develops our perception of his father’s dilemma, and the scene of the boydiscovering his father’s way (in all senses) is both emotionally evocative and spiritually serene. Four cheers for Simon Ortiz. KARL KROEBER, Columbia University Ghost in the Wheels: Selected Poems. By Earle Bimey. (Toronto: McClel­ land and Stewart, 1977 [paperback]. 159 pages, $4.95.) Earle Birney, elder bard and best known of all Canadian poets, has been lionized, eulogized, re-printed and anthologized. And then The Collected Poems of Earle Birney, 2 Vols., appeared in 1975. Ghost in the Wheels, 1977, contains a representative selection of “vintage” Bimey drawn from the collection. That Ghost in the Wheels also contains one or two fine additions written since 1975 means that Bimey’s Collected Poems will have to be extended to at least Vol. 3 and maybe 4. He absolutely refuses to die, and thus effectively prevents his being properly elegized and most probably canonized. Earle Bimey’s poems or, as he prefers, “makings,” in Ghost in the Wheels have life and change written all over them. The blurb on the back cover of the book assures the unsuspecting reader that “each poem appears in its definitive version.” Don’t you believe it. Bimey is very much alive and will keep changing— some say meddling with — his “mak­ ings” until his last gasp, and the even bet is that he will, like George Bernard 282 Western American Literature Shaw, leave posthumous instructions to all future editors. A far greater fear, for all future editors, is that he will not leave any instructions at all, presenting to textual academia, with whom Bimey has always had a lovehate relationship, a problem of canonical text as perplexing as that of Emily Dickinson. And Bimey must surely relish this thought and this analogy. Bimey’s great genius and his main fault are those of the experimenter, the craftsman-perfectionist and the innovator in both the best and the worst senses of the words. He has attempted every poetic form, used all ploys and experimented with all powers of language, and like the voice in his poem “Museum of Man” he has tried on for size almost all metrical and stanzaic patterns. He is a constantly creating making changing poet. Many of his poems carry two dates, the date of the original “making” and the date of the revision. “What’s So Big About Green” is now dated “Harrison Lake 1949/Aberdeen 1971/Vancouver 1973.” But for how long? At one time Bimey used standard punctuation; now he uses almost no punctuation at all. The lines in many poems now appear spaced-out —less grammatically intelligible —for a with-it audience of the late 60s. In the earlier versions of “David,” Bimey’s most famous poem, the “kite” appears “buoying/ Blackly over the wrinkled ice” and over the paralyzed body of David. The “kite” which evokes the image and association of carrion in Bimey’s or anyone’s...

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