Ten Poets: a Review

Essay Review TEN POETS: A REVIEW The poems under review fit into one of three universal categories: the one in which the narrator reports and interprets but does not participate in an event, the one in which the narrator does not move very far away from describing the personal dimensions of an experienced event, and the one in which the narrator describes something he has experienced while simul­ taneously or subsequently complicating it for thematic purposes. Each book contains more of one category than of the other two, allowing generalizations. Poets belonging to the first category listed above find their materials at a greater remove than do the poets in the other two. Conger Beasley, Jr. draws on accounts of Harry Truman’s walks, Anglo race riots in the Los Angeles Barrio during World War II, and de Anza’s explorations of the Colorado Desert in 1774 for poems in Over DeSoto’s Bones (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1979. 57 pages, $2.50). For Beasley, this remove allows a freedom to be exuberant, strange. His poems may call forth laughter, shock, or sorrow, but always there is an interest that frequently rises to delight. In “Approaches to Splendor: Ferde Grofe, 1921,” we see that “Ferde Grofe looks over the Grand Canyon” to whisper not only “Some cut,” but also “Art requires the deftest touch to limn what is already there: / Subtle mag­ nification of unimpeachable sources.” Quite a deft touch shaped these poems, for the magnification turns out more subtle and the sources more unimpeach­ able than the exuberance sometimes allows the reader to believe possible. A poet using this approach grows daring when his sources provide imagery, rhythms, and tones rather than or in addition to providing subject matter. Alan L. Steinberg’s Ebstein on Reflection (Pocatello: Idaho State University Press, 1979. 50 pages, $2.50) portrays a middle-aged college pro­ fessor, Ebstein, in a variety of situations. Steinberg creates extra resonances by seeing his protagonist through the agency of literary sources. Epigraphs for the book come from Yeats and Eliot. Echoes of a number of poems, especially Eliot’s, occur throughout, as in these lines from the title poem: “We stood in shadows/of junipers and circled round/like a crown of thorns./‘Once there were irises,’/ you said suddenly,/‘but Mother cut them./ Do you like my hair long?’” When using this kind of source in this way, the poet risks losing his own sound in the echoes such looming reputations create. The risk of losing harmonies also appears, for the echoes may come 214 Western American Literature at inappropriate times. Occasionally, both problems appear in these poems, in the form of allusive images used to decorate rather than to reveal Ebstein. One does not lose interest in the character and wishes to see him more clearly than such images as mermaids who “clamber/on the sea’s humped back/and curse the phases of the moon” allow, sometimes. The second category of poems contrasts with the first in that the speaker’s own experience makes the poem. Although personal, these poems must give up privacy when written down. If successful, these poems satisfy at least the natural curiosity people have about the doings of others. A neg­ ative effect may also happen. The material may remain private because of a too-limited frame of reference. One might have to be a friend of the poet to grasp, not to mention appreciate, the poem. Talking to the Land (Tuc­ son: Blue Moon Press, 1979. 52 pages, $10.00 cloth, $4.50 paper), by Patricia Clark Smith, suffers at times from the problem named. The nar­ rator goes with family and friends to Indian religious ceremonies and on picnics, or she thinks back on her past. While she identifies almost every locale and person in the poems, the names do not serve to conjure with, despite the speaker’s apparent desire that they do so. Other dimensions of some of the poems also remain more private than one would hope. These lines from “Walking the Arroyo” describe the situation and pose the neces­ sary question: “I am filling the arroyo, gigantic I,/a cosmos swarms between this...