Flower Wreath Hill: Later Poems by Kenneth Rexroth, and: An Autobiographical Novel by Kenneth Rexroth (review)

Reviews 265 opening poem, “Tide,”which announces the poet’s arrival on the Pacific coast, “homing through foreign land, home to the ocean,” to “Semblance on Sem­ blance,” where he sees “in the sun over water of morning/. . . pelicans turn, curve upon curve unfailing/till flicker and dip and twist—as if/wingbone broke—/topple and drop/beak into sea,” the reader feels the pull of the awesome yet delicate and variegated power, beauty, and mystery of our last meeting places ofwestern spaces with the Pacific Ocean. There are more than a few resonances of Robinson Jeffers here. Besides the poems of nature and landscape, there are some translations of fellow poets’ poems, poets like Borges and Leopardi. Some, like “Laguna Beach: A Celebration,” suggest the carefully wrought preciseness of sculpture and painting, in the manner of Christopher Buckley’s works dealing with the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe. This contemplative “celebration” evokes the evolution of the place from “a scatter of houses” to “the village changing” and on to the “decade of the town”and the “time of the city.”This humanly wrought change is meshed with the changeless mating of night and day, star light and city light, waters and cliffs, tides and shores. Other poems provide a wondrous display of unity of sound, structure, and meaning; such a poem is “Green Wave of Cuyutlan”where the opening stanza employs an impeded grammar and alliteration to suggest the movement of waves, with the emphasis striking at lines’ end: “Dry strew of those dead small seasnakes, tatter and tangle trampled/Like cordage in powder of sand, mea­ sured a wave to come.” Then in the second and concluding stanza, these impediments are varied, released or carried over into caesuras, all this “swaying and lifting a blade of needs/Unsheathed yearlong in that place of the ola verde of April.” The reader may be reminded of the moving meshing of sound and sense into fresh visual pictures that occurs in some of Hopkins’s poems like the “Windhover.”Finally, this volume takes its title from the poem, “Flame,”which evokes a complexity of creativity, destruction, and consciousness suggestive of Jeffers. This is a fine body of work indeed. CHARLES H. DAUGHADAY Murray State University Flower Wreath Hill: LaterPoems. By Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions, 1991. 148 pages, $9.95.) An AutobiographicalNovel. By Kenneth Rexroth. Edited by Linda Hamalian (New York: New Directions, 1991. 542 pages, $14.95.) Kenneth Rexroth’s An Autobiographical Novel, skillfully edited by Linda Hamalian, covers the life of the West Coast poet, social radical, and verse translator from his early Midwest days to the late 1940s in San Francisco. Beyond 266 Western American Literature showing the development of an extraordinarily erudite iconoclast, this absorb­ ing autobiography exhibits a vivid, unique account of the 20th-century bohe­ mian vanguard whose libertarian and communitarian values were, claims Rexroth, universalized in the countercultures of the 1960s. If the title suggests fabrication, Rexroth’s material usually feels imaginatively true. This valuable book on a great American transvaluationalist should be supplemented by Hamalian’s biography and Rexroth’s superb poetry itself. Flower Wreath Hill, which brings together two late volumes of Rexroth’s poetry, New Poems (1974) and The Morning Star (1979) (which includes the magnificent Marichiko verse series), fittingly ends this underrated poet’s ca­ reer. Consisting of translations and imitations from Chinese and Japanese poets but even more of original poems plus helpful notes by Rexroth, this collection offers a distillation, partly “Asian,” partly universal, of Rexroth’s high gift for love and nature verse reduced to its most crystalline simplicity, lucidity, and profundity, and further evidences his stature as a major poet. Wreath is in a class with some of Rexroth’s 1940s and 1950s verse, his best poetry. DONALD GUTIERREZ Western New Mexico University Things Happen: Poems ofSurvival. By Emma Lou Thayne. (Salt Lake City: Signa­ ture Books, 1991. 80 pages, $18.95.) Things Happen is an examination of the way we strive to make connections in a world of separating realities: language, borders, politics, mortality. Thayne’surgent call to connection in these poems stems from her reflection on her life and career as a writer...