Agua Negra by Leo Romero (review)

Reviews 291 wilderness, the comic who is scared of bears, the introvert who spends three boring days alone in a cabin, and the journalist who discourses on Alaskan land-use policies. Thus, by the last page the reader is not quite sure who wrote the book. Going to Extremes is markedly similar to Coming into the Country (1977), though McGinniss doesn’t acknowledge McPhee in his references. Both writers visit Alaskan cities, bush settlements, and back country. They interview the same people, such as Atwood in Anchorage and Hudson in Talkeetna; McGinniss even goes hiking with Kauffmann of the National Park Service, just as McPhee did. Yet McGinniss’s style lacks the effortless clarity of McPhee’s writing. In the climax, describing a trip to the Brooks Range, he becomes so desper­ ate for words that he quotes from a companion’s journal, in which the mountains are a “symphony in rock,” “soaring crescendos of the peaking spires,” and “violent turbulence of conflicting forces.” McGinniss might have done better without his literary friend’s help. McPhee creates a world of vivid people, ravishing landscape, and bold extremes; McGinniss, however, presents a diluted, fragmented, and not very pleasant picture of Alaska. We meet whores, drunken Eskimos, drugged whites, red-neck oil-workers. There seems to be scarcely a normal, likeable person in the territory. Moreover, Alaska is cold and dark, drab and frightening, plagued by mosquitos and grizzlies. One ends up being uncer­ tain of the author’s intentions. The Book-of-the-Month Club chose Going to Extremes as a Main Selection, perhaps because it is an easy-to-read version of Coming into the Country. It is a much shorter book, and each chapter is titled by geographic place. This book made me appreciate in retrospect McPhee’s more authentic and thoughtful writing. VALERIE P. COHEN, Cedar City, Utah Agua Negra. By Leo Romero. (Boise, ID: Ahsahta Press, 1981. 42 pages, $2.50.) Leo Romero lives in and writes of New Mexico, a place that truly is enchanted. Romero’s poems are filled with detail, mystery, superstition. And authenticity. His poems are of the earth and of the people of the earth and he has sought out the tales of their relationship: I search for a history of this valley but no one wrote it down so I look for anything 292 Western American Literature For a scrap of paper with a few words but I find nothing other than some names and dates written in family bibles I am left to construct a history where there are no written records His work has not been the quest of a stack rat in the archives of a uni­ versity library. His search took place in the mountains of reality and in the badlands of dream and intuition, in the dark nights alone when the wind brought the sounds of a distant flute, invisible footsteps, the tortured breath­ ing of that other, “cautious as a prowling moon” : Far away a bird is calling when it should be asleep and I want to call back I want to speak so all of the night and silence can understand me like this bird, but the moon continues his tales undisturbed I listen, perhaps I will write it down and say, this is how the people lived in the valley, a lying moon and a lonely bird say it all Romero is a good listener, and he has a fine eye. He is an observer who can describe and do it well, and at the same time compose a fine, tough narrative. “What the Gossips Saw” and “Owl” are the products of a story teller who knows how to set his reader/listener up and leave him dangling in the realm of his imagination. He spins a web of image and illusion as well as anybody: he lay in bed dying from cancer I would sit quietly in his room on a chair against the wall His hair was as white as God’s and people would come to ask for his forgiveness It must be remembered that these poems rise from an oral tradition. Romero found his poems just like his wood...