No Moving Parts by Susan Strayer Deal (review)

318 Western American Literature less, he gives some of the arresting descriptions and evaluations of western lives and landscapes characteristic of his best work. In the essay on Olson, Dorn’s style, creating “a kind of alarming suggestion,” sometimes alarms through vagueness. The short book reviews work best. In them, Dorn astutely examines the artistic and social contexts of significant contemporary writers, some undeservedly obscure. In one insight, he notes that Creeley, another of the many successful Black Mountain poets, frees his writing from the local to make it more precise. Later illustrates Creeley’s distillations of experience into short poems with short lines. However, he does not manifest the profound tension sus­ tained in his earlier poetry. In “Place,” he admits “I need the oldtime density.” Here, particular locales obtrude upon emotions, for the aging speaker wishes to look about at what he knows he must soon leave. The result: one “finds a home / on earth.” (“Later”) This statement may sound trite, but actually expresses a genuine stage in Creeley’s search for ways to be at rest in the whirl of feeling. Later shows that perhaps the power of his relaxation has not the strength of the earlier power of his tensions, but the promise grows. DALE K. BOYER, Boise State University No Moving Parts. By Susan Strayer Deal. (Boise State University: Ahsahta Press, 1980. 50 pages, $2.50.) In this first volume of poetry, nature is the poet’s shaper as well as her subject. Reporting on natural phenomena from the summer pastures or winter storms of the sandhills, Deal tries to avoid analysis. She claims Living is not cerebral. There is only the magic of hunger. The feverish sun, the shells of old Depression barns, like grey fists, and land. Land of grasses and grasses. The mind rings only against the sky. But she cares too much about the place, and its power over her is too magnetic for her to maintain much distance: “I think it wants me. / The horizon, with a / blue tug, makes me / walk in its direction.” Characteristically, Deal walks carefully across her landscapes, intruding as lightly as possible upon them. As she watches a sunset, for instance, she sees herself become “a cavity, a / black spot, the small, lost / shape of my Reviews 319 ancestor’s soddie.” The idea of nature’s synchrony underlies most of the poems in No Moving Parts. Although it is best captured in the title poem in the line “All is a piece / of perpetual motion,” we are reminded of it over and over. It is remarked in the unified beating of a butterfly’s wings, and in the immense, creative power of the wind as it “lays its / blistered hands on us, / slapping us human.” The poems in No Moving Parts are spare and personal, but they are not private. If anything they are too transparent, being at times prose obser­ vations cast in the broken-lined guise of poetry. But, though the poet’sartistic sense is obviously heightened by her sandhills subject matter, it is when she draws back from that landscape and frames it in a broader perspective that she is strongest and most lyrical. In “We Have No Fat” Deal creates a clear, forceful comparison without excessive reliance upon personification or explanation: We have no fat trees. They are lean. How in Kentucky, I was so surprised to see an oak as thick and tall as a barn. How I looked at it in disbelief and how they were neck deep in chain saws, cutting it down and how I would have taken all the saw dust like muscle and fat and patched it to our river trees and made them stronger and fatter against this cruellest wind. Deal is to be admired for her gentle, consistent attempts to articulate the complexities of nature’s interdependence. She has largely avoided two serious pitfalls of the nature poet: sentimentality and preaching. Her poems ask the reader to listen to nature, to walk out at dusk and experience “the purples and / the blues and the blacks.” They do not damn the twentieth century 320 Western American Literature or fate or human nature. Natural forces...