Flights of the Harvest-Mare by Linda Bierds, and: Selected Poems by Carolyn S. Foote (review)

170 Western American Literature one of the finest things that Hamill has done. “Now that the nets are gone, the brass fittings stripped from the/wheelhouse, cobwebbed and dark, now that the anchor/is dragged away?” That question mark, and that fragment, are the very signs of this poem; what is the past, what is the meaning? But how concretely, strangely, asked. Not all the poetry here comes up to the level of “Requiem,” of course. Hamill can strain: “funky Fred Goudy” or “I take away their faces carved/ into my mind with razor blades.” Nevertheless in much of this poetry of his middle years he has made something very beautiful. Wilson’s poetry also creates a landscape and human beings; but the land­ scape is heavy with the sadness of human history. Wilson has attempted a difficult thing here. Almost all these short poems are about Romania (where Wilson had a Fulbright). And, although Wilson usually speaks in his “own” voice, many of the poems are attempts at creating a persona who is out of that Romanian past; some are “translations” from headstones; some stories about “historical” figures. One can praise a poet for trying to feel himself into another person’s existence, especially someone utterly foreign. But these other voices or recrea­ tions of past people don’t always succeed;the poetry becomes a bit “academic,” in that it seems willed and not fully realized. Still, these are good poems, worth reading, for they let us know what it is like to be alive in another world: “Strange lights upon the flowers, straw/ men, moving with purpose across streets/hooded to history, the pathways of princes.” L. L. LEE Western Washington University Flights of the Harvest-Mare. By Linda Bierds. (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1985. 56 pages, $3.00.) Selected Poems. By Carolyn S. Foote. (Boise: cold-drill books, 1984. 62 pages, $6.95.) A widowed mother and grandmother, Carolyn Foote burned to death at sixty-one when her small trailer caught fire in Montana in 1980. In the pile of ashes left by the blaze, the poet’s elder daughter discovered a metal box containing most of the poems printed in Selected Poems. I can imagine what an important discovery this must have been for Foote’s family, the woman’s very authentic voice and refreshingly recalcitrant personality rising, as it were, out of the ash of her death. Yet the volume, co-edited by the poet’s younger daughter, could have been half as long as it is without harming its worth. Most of the poems are autobiographical (not maudlin, deep, profound or, as poetry, well-crafted) ; and what they have in common is the expression of their maker’s tenacious desire to live life fully and originally—not an easy desire for an Episcopal Reviews 171 Bishop’s wife (“. . . She has to give birth / To sons of Bishops, alas!” she says in a limerick). One may read about Foote’s life in her poems, and especially in her daughter’s six-page-long biographical essay entitled “Foote-notes” ; but rather than for its poetry, Selected Poems is memorable for the strong indi­ vidual whom it introduces to the reader. Linda Bierds’ poetry occupies the opposite extreme to Foote’s, in that her private life is never the subject of her poems. Bierds “tells the stories of trans­ formations,” says Pamela Stewart in her introduction to Flights of the HarvestMare \ and there are, indeed, transformations here: A snail, in the hand of blind Helen Keller, is transformed into a “Tongue,” the thing’s essence pre­ ceding language, that world-restricting form of cognition that spells the thing into definition: “. . . the tingling sn and ail.” “Tongue” isboth a lovely poem and an excellent example of Bierds’ central concern as a poet; and the image she creates of Keller holding both her hands out to the world isunspeak­ ably poignant. In one hand she holds the thing-tongue, and in the other “Someone” spells out letters that, while defining the world, restrict the indi­ vidual’s responses to it. Snail thereafter may be like a tongue but is not a tongue. Simile, then, becomes the inevitable device one resorts...