Marking the Magic Circle: an Intimate Geography by George Venn (review)

Reviews 179 poets are discernible, but this reviewer found nothing approaching outright imitation. It is not possible to predict who among this large and promising group of mostly young poets will achieve wider recognition in the years ahead. There are some very fine poets represented, but in a brief review it would be unfair to single out one or two, while ignoring others of equal promise. It is enough perhaps to note that these two volumes offer proof that serious poetry is alive and well today in one western state not noted in the past for its literary achievement. ROBERT D. HARPER Estes Park, Colorado Marking the Magic Circle: an Intimate Geography. By George Venn. Photo­ graphs by Jan Boles. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1987. 196 pages, $12.95.) Poetry, autobiography, literary history, translation, fiction,essay—all these forms await the reader of George Venn’s elegant text which makes one nostal­ gic for a childhood with a barn. A thesis is advanced here: human life lived in intimacy with the environment is centered, perhaps sacred; and the litera­ ture which arises from such a life has substance, is perhaps healing. “From the long effects of time in place comes a kind of spiritual ecology, an intimate genealogy, a novel.” A region, the microcosm, fosters the values of “confidence, wholeness, intimacy”; the distinguishing feature of the Northwest microcosm seems to reside in nature and the human response to it. The “magic circle” sustains and renews its inhabitants. Venn shows in his poetry a care for language and for true naming; in “Making Porridge” a bowl of oats reflects the geography of a life; in his trans­ lations from the Chinese there is a dialogue between languages and cultures. In the essays, Venn explores the linguistic terrain of words such as lamp, barn, circle. Language is seen as a tool for making “immediate sensible cosmos out of the blizzard.” In the fiction and essays Venn also displays a caring for individuals. The old lady shoplifter, the boy fleeing home and school in the Wonderbread truck, the young man watching the slaughter of sheep, the student in the harvest bunkhouse—these figures are presented with loving and articulate detail. A more theoretical caring for the region is demonstrated in the essays on Northwest literature and on Nard Jones. These defend the contribution and necessity of regional literature, writing aware of more than “an exclusively human world.” Venn’s text is an example of continuity “among language, experience, and environment.” It is a defense of regionalism in the best sense, by both example and precept. 180 Western American Literature All this is not new, but it is humane. And it is universal in its impulse because it is aware of other regions and their intimacy: “For me, the authentic map of the universe is composed of these microcosms—domes and domes of specific human light, crossing all abstract political, geographic, economic, and racial boundaries.” CAROL S. LONG Willamette University The American West as Living Space. By Wallace E. Stegner. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. 89 pages, $10.00/$18.00 text edition.) Longtime readers of Stegner will have the feeling that they’ve encountered parts of this book before, and they’ll be right. This series of three transcribed lectures is a quintessence of his struggle with the West-as-it-is, a careful con­ densation of large themes into measured space. Two beauties coexist in this slim volume: it gracefully documents a lifetime of study and thought on the American West, and it was distilled by Stegner in his own voice. In the preface, he says, “I decided that I would rather risk superficiality and try to leave an impression of the region in all its manifestations, to try a holistic portrait, a look at the gestalt, the whole shebang. . . .” What results is a deeply engaged set of descriptions that is also engaging, even as it kicks the props from under large portions of western myth. It rings true, and will make both native Westerners and pilgrim/aficionados squirm, though for different reasons. “Living Dry” defines the territory and the terms. Stegner follows Powell in letting the landscape and...