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Reviews 183 Idaho’sPoetry: A CentennialAnthology. Edited by Ronald E. McFarland and William Studebaker. (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1989. 250 pages, $16.95.) Reading Vern Rutsala’s poem “Words,” I can see why it was that Idaho and her neighbors in the West needed a poetry of their own. Westerners encountered in European and Eastern books and movies words such as “dining room, study, / mantel piece, lobster / thermidor”■ —words that did not “fit / our cold linoleum, / our oil lamps, our / outhouse.” “This,” says Rutsala, “is why we said ‘ain’t’/ and ‘he don’t.’” We knew better but it was wrong to use a language that named ghosts, nothing you could touch. (114-15) To use a language that names what we can touch has been a primary goal of Idaho’s poets; and their achievement is well represented in McFarland and Studebaker’s fine centennial anthology, which gathers 243 poems. Including work from the Native American oral tradition and by 129 individual poets, it is the most comprehensive collection of Idaho poetry ever assembled. A distinguished Oregonian, William Stafford, introduces the compilation and also presents two of his own poems inspired by visits to Idaho. Then the first section, “Native Poems,” includes twenty-two selections from the oral tradition, as well as eight poems by three contemporary Native poets. Section two, “The Pioneer Poets (1860-1900),” offers a look at the folksy verses of eighteen writers who were kindred spirits of James Whitcomb Riley. But the “Poets of a New State (1900-1940) ”—Vardis Fisher, Yvor Winters, and their contemporaries—gave us not just verse but poetry. In the last two sections— titled “The Third Generation (1940-1980)” and “The Contemporaries”— readers of this journal will recognize the names of Ed Dorn, Vern Rutsala, Richard Shelton, Penelope Reedy, Ford Swetnam, Tom Trusky, and Harold Wyndham. They and the other eighty post-1940 poets hail from every corner of the state; and although many of the anthology’s poems are published for the first time, some of them appeared earlier, either in one of Idaho’s dozen literary journals or in national periodicals. What of the quality of Idaho’sPoetry? It compares well with similar col­ lections from other states, and it certainly illustrates the struggle to use a language that names something besides the world east of the Mississippi. Indeed, through the efforts of writers like those represented in Idaho’s Poetry, we may eventually be able to say of the West and its poets what the narrator of Thornton Wilder’s The Cabala says of Rome and Virgil: “the land that has inspired ssntiment in the poet ultimately receives its sentiment from him.” JAMES H. MAGUIRE Boise State University ...

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