Handspan of Red Earth: An Anthology of American Farm Poems ed. by Catherine Lewallen Marconi (review)

188 WesternAmerican Literature Miwok tale “Mouse Steals Fire”which opens the book, and Theodora Kroeber’s retelling ofthe Wintu tribe’spowerful “Dance Mad.”After that, readers will find white versions of other races and cultures. This is especially puzzling since editor A. Grove Day—author of The Sky Clears, a landmark study of Native American poetry—writes in the book’s preface, “California is famously polyracial and so is this anthology. Its characters represent a multiplicity of cultures and perspectives. ...” In fact, cultures are represented only from the perspective of the tradition­ ally dominant group. For instance, “The Somebody” by Danny Santiago was actually written by the late Dan James; it is certainly strong enough to be considered for a California collection, but it isn’t a view of Mexican-American life from within that culture. Sadly, this anthology isn’t what it purports to be: representative of the real California. Too bad, since Day’s brief notes on authors are first-rate and he has included work by several good writers who are usually ignored (Janet Lewis, Idwal Jones, Edwin Corle) along with more predictable ones (Harte, Twain, London, Stegner, et al.). There have, by the way, also been some good white fictionists in the Golden State since World War II, and they too are ignored by the editor: James D. Houston, Ella Leffland, Charles Bukowski, Kate Braverman, Leonard Gardner, along with transplants like Raymond Carver and T. C. Boyle, who have as much right in a California collection as does Nevada’s Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who contributes what is arguably the best story, “Hook,” to Day’s flawed anthology. GERALD W. HASLAM Sonoma State University Handspan ofRedEarth:An Anthology ofAmericanFarmPoems. Edited by Catherine Lewallen Marconi. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. 181 pages, $24.95/$10.95.) Perhaps our best writers have always strived to capture a special sense of place inhabited by a unique people, and perhaps none have felt this fascination for intimacy more than the poets. I do not mean by “a special sense of place” simply the literary sense of “local color,” an aesthetic movement in which so much ofwhat we call western literature has participated. Because poets are the ones committed to a place and to its people, if one wants to know the quietest intimacies of a place and its inhabitants, then poets are the writers to read. And so while it is true that “the poets in this anthology have in common a farming background or an absorbing interest in farm life,” one instantly recognizes, in the best verse of this admirable collection, that a celebration of the farm and farm life becomes a celebration ofseeing the extraordinary in both the ordinary and the common. Like so many poets who have followed the lead of Walt Reviews 189 Whitman and William Carlos Williams, the most insightful poets included here know that to reveal the profundities of the everyday is the true calling of the American poet. Poets ask us to realize that to know a place we must look closely, the way Wendell Berry, in “The Snake,” looks at “a small snake whose back/was pat­ terned with the dark/of the dead leaves he lay on.”A poet of sensitive and vivid detail, Berry continues, “I held him a long time,/thinking of the perfection of the dark/marking on his back, the death/that swelled him, his living cold.”It is in this kind of sensitivity to detail—to the smallest patterns of detail on a small snake’sback—that the best verse included here exhibits. Small discoveries yield profound insights. William Stafford notices, in the last line of his belated poem “When I Was Young,” that “The clocks, though, still pursue what they endlessly loved.”We, like Stafford, are surprised by the obvious. Not only is the reader startled by the commonplace, and not only asked to see the old in a new way, but to listen differently, too. Ted Kooser reminds us, in telling us “How to Make Rhubarb Wine,” that if you set out to pick a sack of rhubarb, “God knows watch for rattlesnakes/or better, listen; they make a sound/like an...