Moon in a Mason Jar by Robert Wrigley (review)

Reviews 175 In some ways, the book is a memorial, with famous essays published in Hugo’s life (“The Anxious Fields of Play,” “Ci Vediamo”) reprinted here. In other ways this is a book of secrets revealed. Connections between his life and art, once problematic, become clearer: between Hugo’s bleak early life and his later psychological problems, between his Grandfather Monk and Hugo’s love of fishing, between his early loneliness and fear and his famous later gregariousness and great affection. Hugo was always honest about his feelings in his poems, but also equally honest about how poems allow a poet to lie, to change the facts or “truth” for the sake of the music of language. Here, the distance between fact and music becomes clearer, and Hugo’s often painful life and artistic achievements gain a haunting grace. I cannot help but wonder, had Hugo lived to complete his autobiography, if he would have included all the wonderful photographs: childhood, base­ ball teams, fishing trips, family. Probably not; he was painfully conscious of his own success (one essay is entitled “The Problem of Success”) and of the way a poet’s autobiography “should” proceed. But the photographs add a perfect sense of family to this extended meditation on art and life. For, more than anything else, Dick Hugo loved the small details that make humans love each other, and the photographs—like the many poems included in the vol­ ume—only help to bring that love home. “Home” was a word that haunted Hugo most of his life; the one he knew first was silent and cold. This book shows that, with Ripley and friends, he made it. MICHAEL S. ALLEN The College of Wooster Moon in a Mason Jar. By Robert Wrigley. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. 68 pages, $8.95.) Robert Wrigley’s third collection of poems evinces the maturity and cool control of a poet whose first collection, The Sinking of Clay City (Copper Canyon Press, 1979), helped to win his current distinction as Idaho’s State Writer-in-Residence. A student of “the Montana school” under the late Richard Hugo, Wrigley seems to have benefited greatly from Hugo’s sense of narrative. Yet Wrigley truly has his own voice. Unlike Hugo’sassured cadence of declarative sentences, Wrigley’s poems subtly grow with an emotional cer­ tainty. His poems don’t build—they seem to evolve. As the title of this new book suggests, each poem is a light contained. We take each as if from the shelf of a good harvest, dust off the lid, and open to a warm glow. Some of the poems involve the reader in dramatic and sometimes chilling circumstance. The first poem, “Moonlight: Chickens on the Road,” confronts us with a bad traffic accident on a deserted, two-lane road in the Ozarks. A child climbs from the wreck of his family’s car and a farmer’s truck, amid shattered glass and the ridiculous clucking of what’s left of a shipment of chickens. As if delivered to a new world, the child begins walking down the dark road, confused with the growing awareness that, yes, he is alive: 176 Western American Literature And we walked to the cadence their clucking called, a small boy towing a cloud around a scene ofdeath, coming round and round like a dream, or a mountain road, like a pincurl, like pulse, like life. Paraphrasing a moving poem, of course, is hardly fair, yet the first poem portends what Wrigley is to do in the other poems in this book. He tells stories. The stories reveal insights into the brevity of life, the sacred moments people use to balance experiences of violence, death, love, life. What some may feel is missing from Moon in a Mason Jar are the regional affinities that inspired poems in Wrigley’sfirst book, the sense ofplace that fuels the work of other good poets currently living in Idaho and the Northwest. Yet this certainly is not criticism. Indeed, the poet, an Illinois native, seems to rely on experiences of his youth and family for many of the poems, and the collection is more strongly cohesive and...