American Roads by Freya Manfred (review)

66 Western American Literature American Roads. By Freya Manfred. (Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1979. n.p., $7.95.) Freya Manfred is very much her own poet. So, one needn’t necessarily mention in commenting on American Roads — billed by her publishers rather curiously as a “public debut” — that Freya Manfred is also Siouxland novelist and poet Frederick Manfred’s daughter. But everyone knows that Frederick Manfred casts a long shadow as an author, a man and probably as a father. Following a famous father would seem to have both its advan­ tages and its disadvantages. The worst thing one could do might be to ignore the fact or hide it out of pride or stubbornness or whatever. I speculate on all of this because a sense of family is present in Freya Manfred’s verse. She mentions it. In fact, she mentions many things autobiographical. She mentions her previous poetry, past poetry readings, past debuts of many kinds. (Two earlier volumes of Freya Manfred’s verse are A Goldenrod Will Grow, 1971, and Yellow Squash Woman, 1976 — both published “publicly.”) Throughout one senses that she is both a part of and apart from her father and her family, including her husband to whom she dedicates this book. In this sense there is no need for Freya Manfred not to be public about the private perceptions of a female self on contemporary American roads. As for father Manfred, he once said in 1978 when Freya was 33, “She could be better than I am.” It’s the kind of ostensibly casual utterance that People magazine could hear people liking to hear — take it as a blessing or a dare or who knows. The real question might be, “How might daughter Freya take it?” In a special sense, in her poetizing trips and journeys that make up American Roads, she tells us that whether she is better now or ever than father Manfred or father Whitman or sister Emily isn’t as important as being her own woman and person first, listening to herself out loud so that other family of listeners, men and women readers, might also hear something of themselves. Brothers and fathers and lovers, friends and sisters and grandmas make their appearances in this volume. Just about all of Freya Manfred’s personae are female; however, those poems which are explicitly about women, about being a woman, are some of the best. “Grandma Shorba and the Pure in Heart” is a catalog of all the “grandmothers” of a lifetime and the “trouble and pity,” surprisingly, which they can cause. And the love. Age and youth, life and death, the ugly and the beautiful — Freya Manfred’s words about Grandma Shorba represent no less than this. And “Alice’s Poem,” about a grandmother never met, is an entire family album condensed into a few pages of tribute to the continuity of blood. In the over forty poems in American Roads, various readers (of differ­ ing gender and bias) will find various favorites — and of course read them in different ways: for their language, for their lives, for their landscapes. Reviews 67 “For A Young South Dakota Man” and the concluding marathon poem, “American Roads” are two which for me are quintessentially Freya Manfred. No need to quote portions of them here because they defy such fragmenta­ tion. What they prove, among other even more important, lovely things, is that American daughters have marvellous ways of making a place of their very own — roads and continents beyond any once sheltered room. ROBERT GISH, University of Northern Iowa The Masks of Drought. By William Everson. (Santa Barbara: Black Spar­ row Press, 1980. 92 pages, $4.00.) The Masks of Drought, with its tastefully executed three-color cover, with its hand-set type and linotype composition, is a book to restore one’s faith in books. The printing reflects quality and balance; the poetry within is of equal bent. The crushing drought in California of 1976-77 inspired both the title of the volume and provided the impetus for the creation ofmany of the poems. Buthow could such a “monstrous drought”engender poetry, and particularly poetry in a significant new direction...