Time and the White Tigress by Mary Barnard (review)

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 emotionally evocative asa result. RICK ARDINGER Boise, Idaho Time and the White Tigress. By Mary Barnard. (Portland, Oregon: Breitenbush Books, 1986. 80 pages, $8.95.) In Time and the White Tigress Mary Barnard examines sky with the wonder of first watchers who made functional that most abstract of concep­ tions, “time.” Her 1986 winner of the Western States Book Award for Poetry goes to origins of myth and metaphor that make civilization possible. From “Prologue”: No society without customs and with customs come ceremonies (come feasting and dancing). With ceremonies come calendars; before calendars, sky-watchers. Time and the White Tigress weds the rational clarity of science and the imaginative wit of art as did the original sky-watchers when they analyzed cycles of sun and moon, defining and measuring years into halves, quarters, months and days— all accomplished through observation of objects they could see. “The sun by day, the moon and stars by night / display the elapse of time —if the stars are clear,” writes Barnard in “The Jars.” But what if clouds obscure the sky? A timepiece must be invented. The resulting water clock or Reviews 177 “clepsydra” becomes a physical metaphor for the passage of time: “Two identical pots, / one filled with water that trickles out of a hole / to fill the other below it.” Water islife, and water is time, and human life isa span of time: a cup running over or emptied in death. Using the no-nonsense approach of science but with a clarity free of jargon, Barnard remains acutely aware of her own use of figurative language and that of the sky-watchers. “Abstractions like these / need handles, a name, a color, a picture to tell us / this direction iseast, this north.” Metaphor translated the ways of the universe to man. It brought to life language and learning. So metaphor beats at the heart of poetry, ritual and religion. In “Song for the Millenium” : Life runs on and runs out, and time runs on and around, but measured by moons, by daylight and dark, by tides that rise and fall, and by feet that dance. DAVE ENGEL Rudolph, Wisconsin Ultramarine. By Raymond Carver. (New York: Random House, 1986. 128 pages, $13.95.) “Ultramarine” connotes deep blue sea water and the dark, deeper blue of the firmament where the mind wanders in dreams and the soul wanders in death. It also reminds you of the blues, and Raymond Carver’s Ultramarine is full of the blues to the same degree that is full of the sea and the firmament. It is a portrait of the artist in blue-grey middle-age, and it is blunt, simple and complex; in other words, a paradox. Carver’s poems are episodes from his life. They are stories told by an avuncular sort of fellow, sitting on his porch tying flies and spitting in the flower bed. This is amusing for the first dozen pages, until you begin to grow fond of him. Then the characters in his stories start to take on dimensions: his ex-wife; his children, who fill his mailbox with demands for money; his half crazy mother, who blames him when it snows; his drinking...