River-Root: A Syzygy by William Everson (review)

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 old lawn mower rolled downhill.”And finally, Robert Morgan, in “Hubcaps,” defamiliarizes the old images: “The tractor runs over dirt and shapes it, turning/stubble and moving the hill/furrow by furrow to the ter­ races,/slicing clods, wearing/them away and chopping roots/to rot in sweet beds of decay.”Perhaps we’ve noticed this activity many times, but until we read this passage, it is as ifwe had never seen it before. The poems of this anthology express a range of experiences, from loss to anger to despair, from the virtues of honesty and integrity to familial love, in spite of their use of subjects that would at first appear to have little or no worth, like corn picking, or a hog killing, or an Easter colt. By continually demonstrat­ ing that there are indeed universes in grains of sand, the poets here have reminded us of the essential mystery in the light of common day. SAM UMLAND University ofNebraska at Kearney River-Root: A Syzygy. By William Everson. (Seattle: Broken Moon Press, 1990. 35 pages, $14.95.) This slim book from one of the West Coast's fine small presses containsjust one poem, a revised and expanded version of the 1976 River-Root. It is a magnificent poem, a consummation for William Everson (formerly Brother Antonius), who is now in his seventies after a long and productive writing career. River-Root is the detailed, straightforward narration of a man and a 190 WesternAmerican Literature woman wakening in the night and having passionate sexual intercourse. No, not “making love.” In the honest fire of the poem, even that polite term curls like dry paper and burns. The “river”of the title is clearly the Mississippi, although it is never named. It is the phallos, the male sexual force that has “but one resolve: to deliver.”The husband and wife live beside the river, and their joining is equated to the joining of the great, continent-scouring river to the Gulf. It is also equated to the joining of animals far up in the sources of the river—the Rocky Mountain crags where the “bighorn ram covers his ewe in a rushing tussle, the loose rock/ Swirls under chipping hooves,”or the “water delled flats”where “the mountain buck springs his start in the doe,/Pine needled earth rucked under his pitch, the rubbed antlers rattling.”But thejoining of the human couple is more than any of these couplings, “For over the bed/Spirit hovers, and in their flesh/ Spirit exults . . .’’To quote these few lines is only to hint at the resonances that infuse the poem but never render it pompous or over-solemn. This sexual union is archetypal and sacramental; it is a syzygy in its root meaning of “a coupling,”and in its...