Making Certain It Goes On by Richard Hugo (review)

236 Western American Literature the “adopted” boy, for reasons which are not immediately clear. The boy, knowing neither his real mother nor father, begins a desperate search for the man who left his mother. His foster mother, Nancy, is a figure familiar to anyone who has lived around reservations: a woman who makes mistakes, but keeps her family as strong as possible. When she has had enough, she retreats into the powerful matriarchal history of her people, and refuses to take any more abuse, from anyone. Magnuson, the enigmatic white man whom Charlie first hates and finally joins in a strange alliance, grows more in the course of the novel than any other character, except Charlie, seeming to embody what is possible for white society. Nancy and Magnuson, with Charlie, dominate the book. Charlie’s search ends, not really with success, but with something more than he expected to find, and without stumbling into cliche. LINDA M. HASSELSTROM Hermosa, South Dakota M aking Certain It Goes On. By Richard Hugo. (New York: Norton, 1984. 456 pages, $25.00.) Richard Hugo’s M aking Certain It Goes On is one “last good kiss,” his last book of poetry. Dick died suddenly in October of 1982, of a fungal pneumonia after a second surgery for cancer. He died in Seattle, his first home, and his ashes were scattered over the waters of Puget Sound, into which the Duwamish flows. Dick used to walk by that river. Those walks led to the early poems of A R un of Jacks (1961). All the rivers, towns, trout streams, bars, baseball diamonds and that field of grass outside Spinazzola, Italy — all the places of Dick Hugo’s life and the people he met, found, took to those places — are contained here, and it is a wealth of finding, taking and meeting. When we read Dick Hugo’s work, we cannot help but find essential places in ourselves. Seattle, Port Townsend, Ovando, Philipsburg, Spinazzola, Little Rock, Uig — everywhere, Hugo isfaithful to the particulars of place, rooting himself again and again in the small details of natural landscape and human life. He trusts small details as he trusts the soundsof words to help open imaginative possibilities. Early in his work, the rootedness of detail and the sounds of words combine in almost religious seriousness; later, the poetic rootedness in sound and detail provides a foundation for greater imaginative play. The pivotal poem seems to be “The Art of Poetry” (W hat Thou Lovest Well Remains American, 1975), where “Sad Raymond” learns “the moon is cavalier.” By White Center (1980), Hugo echoes the imaginative play of Stevens in “Scene” and “Snow Poem,” and this dimension of his poetry continues in the “Stone Poems” of his last book. More to the point, however, in his later poems Hugo is able to combine imaginative play and his earlier rootedness in the particu­ lars of people and places, as in most of the poems in The Right Madness on Reviews 237 Skye (1980) and those of this final work. Where the imaginative power of Stevens stays in the hothouse world of literary sensibility, Hugo’s poetry pre­ sents imaginative power rooted in the common lives of human beings. His poetry also shows imaginative power as necessary for human survival. Hence the title of this volume, and the title poem, about a town near the Big Blackfoot river, with a nearby power company dam and a fisherman trying “to ignore/the hymns coming from the white frame church,” where the congregation stops coming “when the mill shut down.” The scene is basic Hugo — town, landscape, fisherman — and the poem follows fairly the course of Dick’s career, from a poet alienated and alone to a visionary of human community. I have not made an exhaustive, computer-assisted concordance of Hugo’s total work, but I would bet money that “Making Certain It Goes On” is one of the rare poems in which Dick used the word “community.” He didn’t like the word, and didn’t like confessing to the idea being at the heart ofhis poetry. He once told me he thought of “community” in terms of “the community sing” — organized...