The Make-up of Ice by Paul Zarzyski (review)

Reviews 173 and his “Passage to India” prophecy of easy international brotherhood is undercut here, though Snyder’s tone is somewhat Whitmanic, cataloguing the cosmic in the commonplace, wandering the “Hindu-Disneyland garden,” observing the “colors ofDisneyland heaven,” negotiating the distance between and odd intertwinings of sublime spirit and gaudy vulgarity (“the vulgarity of modern Indian religious iconography does not really detract from its seriousness”), cataloguing the erotic bas-reliefs on ancient temples that suggest “total enlightenment . . . at the moment of orgasm.” And the title resonates with E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, where Forster evokes the same mixture of mystery, fascination, fear, disgust, and admiration that Snyder experiences; like Forster’s character Fielding, Snyder recognizes the impossibilities of comprehending Indian ways, of feeling at home in India, and after he experiences the inexplicable and disorienting riotous festivals, dark caves, unclean masses of starving humanity, he is relieved to emerge from it alive: “Now we are about to leave India, and feeling very lucky to have come through it all intact, with nothing worse than diarrhea a few times, quite elated really. And glad to be leaving, then, because India is not comfortable. . . .” He has sniffed the origin, and has found it threatening and dark in its fecundity. The title echoes, too, with Snyder’s own “Passage to More Than India,” an essay in Earth House Hold, where he explores ways to join the various traditions that form the “subculture of illuminati” — be they Amerindian or Indian — so that “White Indians” might emerge, forming hunting and gathering societies ready to continue traditions when the aber­ rant industrial society destroys itself. And this is, indeed, Snyder’s passage through India; in the early 1960s, the need for the journey was insistent — “Now India.” But as the journey recedes into the past, we see that India was a place for Snyder to go through; it was, in the deepest sense, a ritual of passage, a passage through. As we follow Snyder’s wondrously composting career, we are still discovering where it would all be a passage to. Snyder’smost recent poems, Axe Handles (1983), demonstrate how thoroughly the lessons of India and Japan and of North American native tribes have been absorbed, composted, and molded to serve his labor of creating a home and a family, to dwell fully in a place, Kitkitdizze, where working on a ’58 Willys pickup, chasing a raccoon from the kitchen, talking to the governor, and worshipping Mother Gaia reveal themselves as actions of the same spirit. ED FOLSOM, The University of Iowa The Make-up of Ice. By Paul Zarzyski. (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1984. 55 pages, $6.95.) Paul Zarzyski, as the dust jacket on his first full-length collection of poems tells us, is a professional rodeo cowboy and a Westerner. And the volume abounds with western scenes: fishing, hunting, picking huckleberries, and yes, rodeo. One shouldn’t, however, think of Zarzyski as simple local 174 Western American Literature colorist, a describer of purely regional settings. The poems in this book are made universal by an unabashed commitment to love. Even those pieces marked by loss or heartbreak or death are, in the end, life-affirming and eloquent. Zarzyski means for us to see that life, for all its horrors and frustra­ tions, is a joyful endeavor. The first of The Make-up of Ice’stwo sections is surely the most western. The opening poem, “All This Way for the Short Ride,” begins with a . . . grand entry cavalcade of flags, Star-Spangled Banner, stagecoach figure 8’s in a jangle of singletrees, after trick riders sequined in tights, clowns in loud getups, queens sashed pink or chartreuse . . . It’sa rodeo scene, brought suddenly dark and silent by a “prayer for a cowboy crushed by a ton / of crossbred Brahma.” One senses disaster here, disaster for the book itself, for out of context the scene seems merely maudlin. But not to worry. Zarzyski redeems and excels by giving the poem a persona, a bronc rider in the dark chute with the horse he will soon climb aboard. In a sense, the poem ispure elegy, and explanation — a justification, even — for what on...