Is This Naomi? And Other Stories by L. D. Clark (review)

68 Western American Literature improper not to employ them since these phrases are masterful ones which have become one with the poet’s mien. Jeffers would not have minded since these usages are neither imitative nor obsequious. They are derivative and gain here a new life of their own. But what is most pervasive in The Masks of Drought is a mature and often noble sense of the passage of time; not a tamed poet here, but, like Jeffers before him, a religious poet venerating the “mystery of worship” of the natural w’orld around him. At their best, some of these poems (as from “Jay Breed”) do well To reveal from beyond the screen of Nature The life of God. MARLAN BEILKE, Amador City, California Is This Naomi? And Other Stories. By L. D. Clark. (Tucson: University of Arizona, Blue Moon Press, 1980. 98 pages, $4.95.) L. D. Clark gives us the inner life of man, his growing up through diverse stories, with different protagonists and viewpoints. But unity of outlook prevails from childhood to senility. Why has he called the book “Is This Naomi?” The Lord had sent her out full but she had returned empty. The five-year-old boy in the first story has not even arrived “full.” His father has died before his birth, a loss he finally conquers through his imagination and the help of Uncle Hob, the one dominant male in his environment. Next, a child confronts fear, through the long dark night of his grand­ father’s death, and the familiar family wrangling over religion. Early he has to make his peace both with the “wall of death” and the inconsistency of organized religion. The young man has two dreams — his first involuntary sex release which leads into a terrifying sequence of nightmare (a preview of life) and finally, exhausted, happy sleep beside his beloved. He goes to sea, to war. Intermingled with the heat and stench of the passage, the futile wandering on the rainy, inhospitable deck, comes recollec­ tions of a mad dog, dead but not dead. Symbolically, the war, a rabid creature, seeks to destroy him. In the Pacific isles he finds love (sex) with a native girl, his first experi­ ence with women. When he returns home, suffering a confused identity, he meets the girl who has been waiting for him. Propelled by family and friends — himself not altogether unwilling — he enters marriage with her, a marriage which mingles in his mind with the girl on the island where love had no responsibilities. He chooses community solidarity and contentment. The next story deals with an adverse feeling about going to funerals. Whereas he has enjoyed attendance, now, in one moment, he realizes he has Reviews 69 no desire to be with the dead. He resolves never to attend another burial. But his old friend, Paul, dies and he cannot separate himself from Paul’s experience. He goes to the funeral, chats with old friends, and faces old age and death. The last story finds an old man, only partially sure of w'hat he does, astride a paint pony (is it real or imagined?) escaping boredom and defy­ ing death. The story sequence holds the attention, grips the imagination, and involves the reader’s own life. The author indicates that one lives with what he encounters — with or without hope. The book treats one to a sensitive exploration of the circle of life. The included photographs add to the veracity of the tale. The author reveals a wide knowledge of the human heart. The boy watches the preacher, “dipping his smile at the comers into a sorrowful grimace as they limply shook hands, a grimace like the ones the boy had noted once in a while on the faces of all the preachers he’d ever seen.” MILDRED R. BENNETT, Red Cloud, Nebraska Blue Sunrise. By Bert Almon. (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 1980. 57 pages, $6.95.) In a poem called “Bodhisattva’s Head. Cameron Library,” Bert Almon says, “. . . This figure of compassion / a British major with a hyphenated name / bought in the Khyber Pass — a rifle paid / to a tribesman . . . / Bodhisattva’s career / of kindness descends to...