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Reviews Songs of the Sage. By Curley Fletcher. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1986. 74 pages, $9.95.) With their galloping gait and horseback humor, Fletcher’s poems are classic cowboy verse encapsulating the zesty lifestyle and philosophy of the American cowboy. Hal Cannon’s introduction to this compact, softcover new edition (Fletcher originally published the collection in 1931) adds another dimension to our knowledge of Curley Fletcher— poet, husband, father, cowboy, miner, musician, and business entrepreneur. The book would make a great gift for your favorite cowboy, rancher, western history or literature buff. So now what? Having a yen to add something, I cornered a few cowboys and ranchers I know and showed them this little volume of Curley’s verse. Their opinion of the poems was unanimous: they “liked ’em.” One buckaroo, a cowboy poet himself, especially liked “the little drawings [byGuy Welch] along the border.” Two others launched into stories of their own, one old timer telling about a one-man horse he used to own that threw a stubborn disbeliever into a water trough “before he touched the stirrups,” and the other recounting the rescue of his sister from an amorous sheepman. It seems that part of the function of cowboy poetry is to stimulate the imagination and provoke someone else into telling a story or reciting another verse. Which gets me to the worrisome part. Cowboy poetry is an oral tradition and all this sudden interest in pub­ lishing and preserving it, makes me wonder if cowboys are about to go the way of the mountain men. We are a nation of outsiders. Lacking our own identity, we desperately study, anthologize, and write about those who have one or, especially, about those whose cultures are rapidly disintegrating under the onslaught of technology. Like vultures hovering over a sick cow, we descend on communities in their death throes and try to figure out “what it all means.” Cowboy poetry is full of life and vigor because it is retold and revised by a living group of people who have so far adapted and gone forward despite technology and so-called progress. Perhaps they will continue to adapt and go forward despite anthropologists, folklorists, and the publishing industry. Certain Native American groups seem to be surviving this scrutiny. One can only wish the cowboys well. FLORENCE K. BLANCHARD Blaine County Community Education Hailey, Idaho 166 Western American Literature Wyoming Stories. By Gretel Ehrlich. City Tales. By Edward Hoagland. Capra Back-to-Back Series, Volume VI. (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1986. 162 pages, $7.50 paper.) Of course one distrusts a Californian in Wyoming, especially if she got there by way of a documentary film project, and knows more about the area than some who grew up in the cold high places between the Montana Highline and South Pass. But Gretel Ehrlich, perhaps because of the agonized route she took to the Bighorn country (a route sketched in beautiful essays in The Solace of Open Spaces) and because of a considerable poetic talent, sees the landscape and people enough askew to see them afresh in the short stories that fill her half of this collection. The local ranching folk move shadowed by their pasts and richly entangled, suggesting the novel brewing behind these “segments of a work-inprogress .” Her selection of incidents mirrors the view of life that also lurks behind the typically appalling Montana/Wyoming sense of humor—a view that promises little in the way of redemption but finds something durable along the embarrassing edge where the grotesque can include human tender­ ness. The story of Pinkey, the old hired cowhand, is a case in point. An inci­ dent in which the drunken cowboy, along with neighborhood dogs, chases after and barks at cars, and is finally hit by one, could have been drawn more sharply toward pathos. But Pinkey survives, gets off a few good lines that will be absorbed into jokes in bars and cafes, and settles back, not without insight, into the painful and funny rhythms of his life. Set during World War II, the stories gain perspective through the pres­ ence in the back-country of Japanese-Americans in a relocation...

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