Falling From Stardom by Jonathan Holden (review)

176 Western American Literature Though McGrath now and then strains rather hard for his effects, and naively garbs his Muse in tight-fitting leftwing political clothing, he retains a powerful poetic gift that outshines his verbal exhibitionism and partisan political trumpery. SAMUEL IRVING BELLMAN, California State Polytechnic University Pomona Falling From Stardom. By Jonathan Holden. (Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1984. 68 pages, $14.95.) Almost anyone who is seriously interested in contemporary American poetry, especially the poetry of the West, will be familiar with the criticism of Jonathan Holden. Besides producing one of the first book-length studies of William Stafford (The Mark to Turn: A Reading of William Stafford’s Poetry), a recent book on Richard Hugo (Landscapes of the Self: The Devel­ opment of Richard Hugo’s Poetry), and a provocative discussion of some of the major trends in today’s poetry (The Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric), he has published one volume of his own poetry (Design for a House), and his poems appear frequently in many widely-read journals. People who have been waiting for another collection of his poetry will be glad that 1984 brought forth two such books: Leverage, which W. D. Snodgrass selected as a winner in the AWP Award competition, and Falling From Stardom, an especially intriguing collection centered upon the politics of human, and especially male, sexuality. That Holden manages to focus on this issue while avoiding the obvious pitfalls of sentimentalism, cliché, and narcissistic solipsism is a tribute not only to his ability to use the language effectively but also to reach beyond triviality, to examine the deeper kinds of issues that concern any person who is inter­ ested in the role of sexuality in everyday life. As the book moves forward, Holden plays the poems skillfully off each other, moving back and forth between poems like “On the Roof” and “First Snow,” where the simple pleasures of everyday life — cleaning out the eaves and watching the children at play below, watching drifts of snow turn the back yard’s familiar landscape suddenly strange and haunting—seem momen­ tarily magical and somehow adequate. Probably the most successful poems, however, are those in which Holden uses his sharp eye for detail and his feel for clean, accurate diction to probe the psychological and emotional dimensions of sexuality. One especially strong piece in this vein is “Falling From Stardom,” a poem which pulls together the many and varied themes that have been sounded in earlier poems. Here Holden can say, Reviews 177 When they lend us themselves they use the word love. They would finish with us as with a piece of heavy equipment. Their motion’s a form of immunity. Loneliness gives them freedom to move. and in the next I wake with you, now, and for the first time that I can remember I envy nothing. The morning’s singular, it will not refer. Am I naive? Is this some child’sdrawing? There’s a blue brook. On it, a boat. One cloud. One bird... . Naive? Hardly. Holden looks honestly and deeply at his life, and in doing so forces his readers to look at their own lives in the same way. Not all will be happy with what they see in Holden or in themselves, but few who read this book carefully and sympathetically will come away from it unmoved. CHARLES GUILFORD Boise State University Red Tools. By Stephanie Marlis. (Story, Wyoming: Dooryard Press, 1984. 43 pages, $8.00.) Red Tools’ occasions are ones common to those of my generation: the walk home after taking in a foreign movie, a meditation in the urban garden, the recollection of a childhood spent this side of the European death camps, this side of Hiroshima. Stefanie Marlis’ themes are familiar to anyone, but perhaps because she belongs to a group coming to spiritual age unsure of itself, there is a central theme behind each poem’s ostensible subject — be it the line between possibility and being, the place of others’ lives in one’s own, or the loss of the beautiful in time. What Marlis is really after is vision, by which I mean a coherent and consistent approach to assimilating...