Triada by Sam Hamill (review)

80 Western American Literature admits Anglos who are prepared to participate. Joseph Sommers proclaims a maturity for Chicano literature which deserves special evaluation. Doris Meyer finds that maturity is no quick summer’s growth, that, indeed, Mexican -American writing history is significant. Besides encouragement to Chicanos, Romo and Paredes provide imper­ ative reading for general America. Raymund Paredes’ exposé of non-Mexican and un-American sources of anti-Mexican prejudices is a good starting place. Americo Paredes’ paper corrects stereotypes based upon those preju­ dices as they insidiously penetrate otherwise objective research. José Limón demonstrates that Chicanos are not culturally defenseless in the face of such predispositions. New Directions in Chicano Scholarship must be considered an essential collection of information and emotion for understanding Chicano civiliza­ tion. As social document, it enlightens non-Latin Americans. To the Chi­ cano, it constitutes a satisfying progress report. Subtly, its proportion of Chicano-to-Anglo authors hints that Southwestern population trends are trends in academic progress too. ROBERT G. LINT, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo Triada. By Sam Hamill. (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1978. 107 pages, $4.50.) The influences on Hamill’s poetry are plain enough: Whitman, Pound, Williams, Snyder, a touch of Eliot, and, a little surprisingly, Dante. All these, except maybe Eliot and Dante, are the proper influences for a younger American poet nowadays. And the accepted thematic matters are there: American involvement in Vietnam was an immorality; capitalism (i.e., avarice) is raping the land; certain old people are noble, others aren’t; Indians have a land knowledge that we must learn; love is the great good. Hamill is, in short, impeccably moral. But, even more surprisingly, Hamill’s poetry is not the cliché that one would expect. He is no mere epigone. He names his influences, but he makes them a part of his poetry so that he speaks in his own voice. And those thematic matters are felt, not just expressed. That is, first, Hamill is in love with words, the first requirement of being a poet. “I will forever dream words I can crawl inside,” he says; but he adds that “The Old Language, that weapon / of madmen and the mind’s holy grail, / is employ­ ment of device / as one devises / means of survival: / To be a sailor, listen to the sea!” Language is, then, not mere decoration or self-induljjence; Reviews 81 it is the creation of a life and that life comes from the actualities of our world. And so, second, Hamill’s sensitivity to the land is not a sad fashionableness. He has lived in that land, this American West, not merely on it. The poem itself is in the way of being another modern epic, the long poem made up of lyrical moments, passages; it is the modern poet’s way of creating our myth. Divided into three major parts, “Heroes of the Teton Mythos,” “Solstice West from Tao” (not “Taos”), and Longhair,” it closes with a one page “Epilogue” that repeats the moral message that “where a man honor the Word / the Word / delivers justice.” But, as I’ve sug­ gested, Hamill earns his message. It is no flat assertion. The first image of the poem is of seal hunters, the image of the destruction of the natural for unnatural fashion and unnatural profit. The image will be repeated, in particular almost at the very end of the poem, a connecting and a summary. This picture of violence leads to a series of (mostly childhood) memories of the Western landscape. Some of these memories are of violence too, some are beautiful, and most of them are precisely and movingly evoked. And so Hamill moves from his own West to the whole West and its history, e.g., Bridger, Wounded Knee, etc., so that the land and his own experience of that land grow into one another. The past and the present blend, separate; one disappears, reappears, in a nice mosaic of evocations, echoes, images. Finally, then, the poem’s value is not so much in an abstractable message as in those moments of evocation when Hamill’s language makes us live in a certain intensity...