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Reviews 87 Many of the contributors use economic metaphors to point up the absurdity of applying cash accounting to the life of an ecosystem and the death of hundreds of thousands of birds and mammals. For example, Peter Davison speaks of “cashing in the earth’s bank balance of death.” The cost of civilization is measured here in intangibles—“the cry of the grebe,” the mournful eyes of sea otters. Nature, the supreme intangible, is said to clean itself. But, as a local resident told Jean-Michel Cousteau, “even nature has to dispose of the oil somewhere.” Wendell Berry reminds us, “We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue.” He says accidents like this “should be looked upon as revenges of Nature.” There are nearly 50 pieces, some written before the spill, some in response to previous spills, others bearing no obvious relation to the disaster that has since become commonplace. Several Alaskan writers are missing, having per­ haps been too devastated to write anything. Still, one cannot read the selec­ tions without sensing the grief and loss of part of our last frontier, and reflecting on the cost. SUZANNE SCOLLON Haines, Alaska Other Men and Other Women. By David Dwyer. (Ord, Nebraska: Sandhills Press, 1988. 74 pages, $7.00.) The Farmer’s Daughter. By Kathleene West. (Ord, Nebraska: Sandhills Press, 1990. 72 pages, $8.00.) These two books, installments in the Plains Poetry Series published by the Sandhills Press of Ord, Nebraska, represent two intriguing if contrasting poetic voices of the Great Plains. David Dwyer is a former New Yorker now living in Lemmon, South Dakota; Kathleene West, a native Nebraskan, now teaches in the English Department at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Nominally, one imagines that such discrepant experiences could provide readers with some provocative views of the coming to terms with the Midwest: Dwyer as the transplanted outsider casting an ironic eye, West the insider looking back sentimentally. Thankfully, this is not what one encounters; they are both more clever than this. If there is merit to Harold Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influ­ ence” as a way of reading poets (and I think there is), then these poets exhibit it. As such, both of these authors—literate, educated individuals with a strong sense of poetic history—strive to show that despite the fact that they are Midwesterners by birth or choice, they are by no means “local yokels from a jerkwater town” (to paraphrase a line from Kathleene West’s poem “Progres­ sion”) . If there is a similarity between these two poets of remarkably disparate sensibilities and temperaments, it would be that they both use “the Plains experience” as a means to talk about other things. 88 Western American Literature For Dwyer, this is a preoccupation with what he calls that “uncountable, unaccountable light,” or what he later refers to as “the odd, liquid clarity of the light in this dry country.” But Wordsworth, too, wanted to give expression to “something . . . / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.” Like Words­ worth, both of these poets know all too well what Wordsworth meant by his highly charged term for poetic belatedness, “inland.” For both of these poets, “inland” is meant both in its original usage in Wordsworth and also in the sense of being landlocked—exiled to the Midwest. I suppose if anything can capture a sense of these poets’ epigonal belatedness, or their striving to overcome the self-imposed oblivion of writing poetry in the Midwest, Dwyer’s oxymoronic “inland sea” captures it best: there are imaginative heights to be found here, but at a tremendous personal cost. Finally, there is much to recommend these books, their emotional and conceptual range if nothing else. But they are flawed, however, paradoxically for the same reasons that make them so compelling. Dwyer strives too much to let us know the vast range of his reading, that he has absorbed the British Romantics and Victorians, and that he knows, for instance, how to play Mallarmé’s language games. The allusions fly too fast and too furious (but why wouldn’t they? Fie is “inland” ) . West...

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