Woman Poet ed. by Carolyn Kizer, and: Selected Poems by Hazel Hall (review)

Reviews 159 Geiogamah’s use of light and visuals and the integrating of native song and ceremony within the drama are particularly effective. The play’s only problems are Night Walker’s monologues which tend to be didactic and lengthy. It is unfortunate since the play is well crafted and tends to work best when the dialogue is limited to the needs of the actors and the situation. “Body Indian” presents Geiogamah’s talents at their best. The play follows the efforts of Bobby Lee, a crippled alcoholic who has just received his lease money and is on his way to enroll in an alcohol rehabilitation pro­ gram. He stops off to see some friends who eventually steal the money and spend it on liquor. But “Body Indian” is not about temperance. It concerns itself with the complex relationships that Indians share. Bobby’s friends are his strength and his destruction. They provide a closeness that is both warm and genuine. At the same time, they are able to justify the theft of his money even though it leaves him as broke and destitute as themselves. Geiogamah’s handling of these conflicting themes is extraordinary. He skillfully suggests that while the drinking and the stealing are destructive, they are also forms of a ritualistic sharing, a sharing that helps to maintain humor and kinship in the face of despair. New Native American Drama: Three Plays presents a wide range of theater. While Geiogamah’s control is not always firm, his knowledge of Indian culture is extensive and his insights into contemporary Indian life are profound. TOM KING, The University of Lethbridge Woman Poet. Edited by Carolyn Kizer. (Reno, N V : Women-in-Literature, Inc., 1980. 100 pages.) Selected Poems. By Hazel Hall. Edited by Beth Bentley. (Boise, ID: Ahsahta Press, 1980. 39 pages, $2.50.) Woman Poet, a first volume published by Women-in-Literature, Incor­ porated, supported by grants from National Endowment for the Arts and by The Coordinating Council for Literary Magazines, is brilliantly edited by Carolyn Kizer. She has selected poems by twenty-six western women poets. Poets asking the universe what it is doing for and against order and human reason and value have no gender, though they may be using imagery from kitchen, bedroom, parliament house, schoolroom, factory, forge, garden, grave. Use of metaphor and symbol, basic to art of any genre, should be masterful and original, escaping the limits of person, place or thing, even as necessarily communicating through them. These ninety-eight pages of poems do credit to the art of poetry. The logos at work herein, the patterns and language old as Lydian coins, will never be withered nor staled. 160 Western American Literature There are priceless academic poems in this first volume of a projected series. Even four poems, “Demeanor” and “Figure” by Josephine Miles, and “The Fountain” and “The Garden” by Ann Stanford, would justify the publication of the magazine. “Demeanor” realizes the meaning of dedication to order through disciplines of learning and teaching in the milieu of a University. “Figure” is a religious statement terrifying and vivid as a comet. Stanford’s “The Fountain” realizes tragic destiny as the heritage of the human race controlled by Apollo and Artemis, under the command of Leto, and all that these titanic symbols stand for in the myth of Niobe. Stanford’s “The Garden,” possibly the longest and richest poem in the collection, encapsulates from the whole humanistic tradition “you must keep order.” Anyone who misses “Slow Motion Elegy for Kathy King,” by Madeline De Frees, who seems truly to possess “the clear gaze of the whole woman” will miss being moved to an intensity and depth that are awesome. That poem ends: — “How easily the mind snaps shut on itself, a razor clam. How shall I know the changing women I am : the hermit crab scrambling a private code. Dolphin, smart and playful, towing a man-sized brain. The killer whale spouting news of deep water. Nothing’s the right matter. These waves break over me and break again. Such poems are not the only valuable expressions in this book, which is a treasury of excellence; styles are invariably colorful; the...