Anna’s Song by Arthur Oberg (review)

82 Western American Literature Anna’s Song. By Arthur Oberg. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980. 80 pages, $8.95.) The poems in Arthur Oberg’s posthumous collection, Anna’s Song, are intensely private: confessional, yet elusively indirect and obscurely associa­ tive. They are clearly quite comparable with a good deal of our current poetry that has found its way into Poetry, the academic journals, and certain of the ephemeral poetry magazines. Concerned with such matters as married love, heterosexual love in general, foreign locales, family members and friends, Oberg’s unrhymed, prosy poems reflect a considerable range of conversational rhythms; sometimes the verse lines are end-stopped, now and then they include several mini-sentences to mark a sequence of rapid thoughts. A few are hauntingly suggestive. “A High, New House,” dedicated to Oberg’swife Barbara, is an illustra­ tive example of post-modernist poetical writing of a conventional type: private enough in its tokens of recall and symbolic reference, uninhibitedly public as it lets us in on certain two-part harmonies and disharmonies. The day is informed by “accusations of long weariness,” by the wife’s “wondering over my preference / for lashing out at you”; flowers “puzzle your face.” The possibility of marital survival is freely associated with the lasting quality of the couple’s dishes: “If we are ever to move beyond / anger, we will again be / seated among old cups and / plates, agreeing to keep / the blue ridge along / a white edge . . .” and “each piece in / place, finer with years of / wilful, and gentle use.” “Divorcing,” a woman’s sililoquy (or a man’s attri­ bution to a woman’s thought processes), jumbles images of literary composi­ tion, boating, climatic and psychological storms, and the untying of the marital knot: “Small craft fails. / Simpler, to drift apart.” Yet “you insist he stand / under the biggest tree / in the sweeping meadow / as you count the / seconds between claps / of thundery lightning / moments of surrender / you had no truck with / before the storm. . . .” Poems, drawings, memories, dreams: there is a blurring throughout this volume, of sensations, wishes, and faulty communication with another per­ son. In “Poem for a Quick Wife,” “You are the historian in the house. / In dream and by day, you are always / tugging me back to something I have / missed — a date, some face I would / have left unturned.” “The Smell of Burning” betrays the attenuation of caring, of human concern: he, for example, “Stops writing lyrics at thirty, / grows petulant, forgets the kisses / she likes, the single flower, raven hair.” “The Costs” is another revelation, or betrayal, of wrongdoing by omission: “The splayed woman would hide / in the ink drawing he made / amid millions of lines & / ghostly faces, but I will / not let him have her, or hide / her, so.” Then: “The bright shards that will / neither cut, nor bleed, / I once began, for a wife, /' to wonder why I denied her, / &before morning. . . .” Then too, the geographical references of a personal nature (Washington state, London, Kent, etc.) evoke no sensations of pleasure or delight, just as is the case with most of the domestic and social references (the emotion of Reviews 83 anger is frequently encountered in the poems). One exception: the threepage sequence of prose fragments, “Anna’s Song,” evoking familial memories that are, at least, not unhappy. Spare, stark, cryptic, Oberg’s poetry reflects a rather unusual sensibility and, for all their similarity to a good deal of contemporary, post-modern writing — will likely appeal to a very special kind of reader. SAMUEL IRVING BELLMAN California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Mary Hallock Foote. By Lee Ann Johnson. (Boston: Twayne Publishers/ G. K. Hall & Co., 1980. 180 pages, $10.95.) The bestowers of literary immortality may need more time to decide whether Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1971) ranks among the masterpieces of American fiction, as I think it does; but I know many westerners w’ho say with certainty that Stegner’s novel was for them the most important literary creation of the 1970s. Since Angle of Repose includes a fictionalized treatment of the life of Mary Hallock Foote and since Rodman Paul’s superb edition of her reminiscences — A Victorian Gentlewoman...