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Reviews 143 Looking at a typical page in Douglas Barbour’s StoryforaSaskatchewanNight, you might think his typewriter was broken, the lines sometimes adhering to a left margin, the words sometimes spaced unevenly, most punctuation omitted, and the contractions allwritten without apostrophes. But these aren’t accidents, they’re conscious (if initially distracting) devices; they tell us to pay attention notjust to sentences or paragraphs, but also to individual phrasings, particular words. Barbour manages this with a voice that at its best stays at once disci­ plined, focused, and unpretentious—genuine. Unlike the other three books so far discussed here, Storyfor a Saskatchewan Night does not force itself to a single, book-long form or subject. The result is a collection that lets each poem make its own demands. Monty Reid builds the poems in TheseLawnswith care and intelligence and an ear that loves rhythm and images. These aren’t formalist, rhymed efforts, but they are in-formed, the result of discipline, continuing regard, and an interesting human imagination. In poems like “Dressing Mannequins” (in which a woman thinks of her own daughters as she dresses mannequins for display) and “Sauna” (in which we learn how a place of relaxation can become a place that kills), Reid knows how to slow us down. His roughly iambic lines and his long, relaxed sentences encourage and produce a focused, even elegant meditative attention. Reid also knows how to turn images to his (and to our) advantage. In “Bird Not Singing,”for example, the bird’s failure to sing becomes inextricably woven with a boy’s anger at the failures of his own life and his father’s. These Lawns is a collection in the word’s true sense: it makes a coherent and intricate world. LEX RUNCIMAN Oregon State University Home Coursein Religion. ByGary Soto. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1991. 79 pages, $8.95.) Gary Soto is perhaps the most honored individual to emerge from that creative cluster known nationally as the Fresno Poets. He is also arguably the most accomplished of Chicano poets. Ironically, one reason for both those things is that Soto’s work transcends labels. It is his triumph in this book as in his previous collections that his particular scenes are so often doorways to the universal; what the young Mexican-American boy experienced in Fresno resonates with what other youngsters experi­ enced elsewhere. Home Coursein Religionreveals one more important aspect of Soto’ssuccess: he is unwilling to reap easy praise by repeating what he’s already done well. 144 WesternAmerican Literature Instead, he ranges widely over subjects, styles and even diction. The poetry collected here veers stylistically from his earlier work but continues his explora­ tion of important themes from contemporary life. Like many Catholic kids, Soto has lived through a sort ofblank acceptance, then skepticism, then agnosticism and finally adult reconciliation: I miss not eating fish on Friday, The halved lemon squeezed a third time around, And our prayers, silent mutter To God, whom we knew, whom we trusted To make things right... (from “Pink Hands”) This collection ventures to the author’s high school and the social scene there: “Drinking made you popular at school,/And laughing while you drank/ Made you friends. . . . ” He also reveals a preoccupation of many high-school boys: “... Everyone was larger/in the showers, their cocks like heavywrenches,/ their hair like the scribbling of a mad child.” Soto’s last collection, Who WillKnow Us, was dominated by the death of the poet’s father. In this book, a new persona begins to dominate the family’s life: I didn’t like home. Especially in summer. But eventually I returned to watch My stepfather eat fried chicken on a TV tray. He ate for bulk, not taste, And every night he drank to flood the hole inside him. The poetry of Gary Soto is marked by an oddly satisfying mix ofwonder and crust. He has never succumbed to the overcompensatory praise available to writers from oppressed minorities, but has instead continued to challenge himself and his readers. As a result he is, if not a major poet, then a strong candidate to be one. Don’t miss this latest revelation of his...

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