Ultramarine by Raymond Carver (review)

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 buddies. Eventually, the images from the poems become cinematic—one image leads to the next, and you keep turning pages to see what happens next as if you were reading an adventure novel. About the time you begin to think that these poems are not only simple, but simple-minded, Carver throws a hook into you—a line that is strikingly profound and beautifully stated. It’s like finding Uncle Lou, who works at the gas station when he’s not fishing, sitting on the porch reading Lao-Tse. There is something unsettling about this. Much of the strength of the poems isvisual, and at times it seems that Carver hides behind this strength until it becomes 178 Western American Literature a weakness. What is revealed doesn’t seem to be enough. The depth of the insights jar against the simplicity of the characters as drawn, including the character of the author himself. This may be an intended paradox, for the blue themes of Ultramarine—death, love, choice, and the nature of relation­ ships—tend to make simple stick figures of us all. STEVEN PUGMIRE Seattle, Washington Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. By Marc Reisner. (New York: Viking, 1986. 582 pages, $19.95.) Midway through the present century it was argued that reclamation services—the Army Corps of Engineers, the United States Reclamation Serv­ ice, plus various state agencies—would encourage small, family farms and thus the American Dream, by providing inexpensive water; as Don Villarejo has shown, precisely the opposite has occurred in California’s San Joaquin Valley, perhaps the world’smost thoroughly and precariously irrigated region, where massive corporate holdings have expanded and continue doing so. That was one small deception in a tapestry of self-serving projections and outright lies that have characterized the irrigation of the West. Marc Reisner takes on such absurdities—and far greater ones—writing powerfully and well about perhaps the single most important of western issues: the control of water and the dam-building hegemony. He reveals in this important book the degree to which water politics have taken on a life of their...