Collected Poems 1930–83 by Josephine Miles (review)

Reviews 171 Collected Poems 1930-83. By Josephine Miles. (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983. 253 pages, index, $17.50.) Josephine Miles has received awards for her work throughout her career, and this collection demonstrates why. Selections from eleven volumes of poetry, and fifty-one previously uncollected poems, provide an impressive overview of her work. The chronological organization of the collection reveals a progression from the metrically strict lyrics in the early volumes to looser, more varied forms in the last books. In all of the poems Miles confidently controls the tools of her craft. Miles’s poetic tools are considerable. One of her most impressive gifts, evident especially in the early poems, is her sensitivity to sound. Here, for example, is a line from “Sea-W ind” : “Stones on the hill shrug up their shoulders stiffened and cold.” Another strength of this collection is Miles’s poetic tone and diction : succinct and skillful in the short poems, complex and graceful in the challenging philosophical poems, conversational and even colloquial in the dialogues. The range of Miles’s poetic talent is matched by her range of subjects. She writes about personal subjects such as childhood memories, family rela­ tionships, friendship and love, with insight, humor and an attention to detail that makes the experiences she describes immediate and vivid. In political poems about war or the environment her concern is compelling. In philo­ sophical poems she explores such topics as the sources of art, or the making of American myths, with sophisticated thoughtfulness. An im portant influence on Miles is the fact that she is a Westerner. Miles was born in Chicago and has spent most of her life in California. Western settings form the backdrop to much of her poetry and natural imagery is prevalent, especially in her early poems. The West is also the subject of some of her most interesting poems, from “After This, Sea,” in the first volume, to “Trip” from her most recent volume. “West From Ithaca,” a recent, uncollected poem, shows that for Miles, the West is more than a location: W hen we went out to a country inn for dinner, We turned west at crossroads, west Between maples, west Toward a straight ridge of hills, where the sun was setting. There’s your west, W alter said; Berkeley. But I saw the long labs and markets In Illinois, of afternoons not yet ending, High plains, Boulder, the descent To Salt Lake, cattle and presses driving in Boise, And somebody practicing sailing on the Bay. 172 Western American Literature Now it was dark, there was manifest Tsingdao, Though I could go no farther now it was dark. What do you really see in that streak of light over the ridge? I asked Walter. Your west, he said. The West is lucky to have a poet as talented as Josephine Miles. This collec­ tion of poetry is a tribute to her and a gift to her readers. CYNTHIA H. TAYLOR University of Minnesota Passage Through India. By Gary Snyder. (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1983. 100 pages, $6.95.) Gary Snyder refers to “Turtle Island” as “the old/new name” for the North American continent; in Passage Through India, we get an old/new name for an old/new book about the Indian subcontinent. This combination of journal, travel notes, and poetry-workbook began as Snyder’s letter to his sister Thea about his travels through India with his second wife, the poet Joanne Kyger, in the winter and spring of 1962. (For a strikingly different perspective on the journey, see Kyger’s The Japan and India Journals 19601964 [Tombouctou, 1981].) Originally published in 1972 in Caterpillar, it bore the title “Now India.” One short section, “A Journey to Rishikesh and Hardwar” — covering part of the journey when Snyder and Kyger were joined by Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky — was printed in slightly dif­ ferent form in Earth House Hold (1969). This is an important work to have in print, accessible in its entirety; Snyder’s journey to India was a spiritual journey, a serious search for origins, but while there he faced some of the most threatening images of life that he would...