At the Home Altar by Robert Hedin (review)

Reviews 237 Silko’s work may be the strongest of any writer, Indian or not, male or female, now working in this country. Finally, American Indian Literature’s strengths do not begin to compensate for its weaknesses. These books illustrate the continuing problem for teachers of American Indian literature: our critical works and even our anthologies are not yet up to the high level of the literature itself, both traditional and contemporary, and tools such as bibliographies are only now coming into existence. We may see a change as more and better work is produced. WAYNE UDE, Colorado State University At the Home Altar. By Robert Hedin. (Pt. Townsend, W7A: Copper Canyon Press, $16.00.) There is a mystery at the center of things, at the core. We find it wherever understanding of our own life and motivation fades under exami­ nation, and at the center of the earth where lies the source of life and light and sound, and which holds the bones and artifacts of the ancient ones who have gone before us, whose songs and voices rise to us from the heart of silence. It is a world accessible only by plunging deep into cold rivers, climbing down into caves, lying among the tangled roots of gnarled trees, or surveying a great valley four thousand feet below where we stand. This is the world Robert Hedin penetrates in his search to establish meaning, and he brings back elegant songs and incandescent symbols of the mystery. The landscape of these poems shifts from Alaska to Minnesota to France and North Africa, but the point of departure always lies At the Home Altar. From there Hedin climbs down into the caves “At Bettarram.” They seem to open forever beneath him, and in them he experiences phe­ nomena similar to those of early sea divers who learned the “rapture of the deeps.” There is both calm and an implicit danger, as if one might stay down among the rocks forever, give up the struggle with the real life above and rest always in the sanctuary of the subterranean. The language of the descent is distilled and pure, light and cool as the air of a late autumn afternoon. And I go down, alone, breathing An air that’s never been breathed. . . . And down this far The heart slows and beats As calmly as the water That never stops, That I hear Far down in the caves, Dripping for miles through stone. 238 Western American Literature Down there, or resting eerily in the bottom of a river, Hedin, like Houdini, offers us the trick of the century. He finds both cleansing and freedom under the water, and tries to bring them to us who wait for him to resurface. There is a river under this poem. It flows blue and icy And carries these lines down the page. Somewhere beneath its surface Tricky Harry holds his breath and dreams of his own beginnings, of his birth and boyhood, the girls waiting on the dock, of “escaping from this poem,” Of cracking the combination To his own body And those warm young safes Of every girl on the dock. The lure of the depths has its own calm appeal. It cleanses us. Even the chains that confine us are redeemed from their rust, and ultimately the water provides us a way to freedom. Down there, “lying chained to the silt,” Tricky Harry Feels the blue rush of the current Sweeping across his body Stripping his chains of their rust Until each link softens And glows like a tiny eel. At thfc heart of things there is still, and always, the mystery. But, Hedin seems to say, in the midst of the everyday, the tiny sacraments of our daily lives at the home altar not only make it all worthwhile, but a sacred enter­ prise that finally affirms the effort to live in spite of the loss, loneliness and apparent lack of meaning that life entails. In this he echoes Martin Buber who said that the everyday is hallowed because it is the ground upon which we confront the Mystery and have to live with it. Among those for whom poetry is a...