Things Happen: Poems of Survival by Emma Lou Thayne (review)

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, her travels to the pre-perestroika Communist Bloc, and her coming-back-from-death experience after a near-fatal car accident. The first section of the book, “Come to Pass,” most resembles Thayne’s earlier work in terms of ritual familial and coming-of-age themes with poems like “Sailing at 54 with a Big Brother,” “Remembering Five Daughters Grown out of Home in Utah,” and “Baby Horse Birthday.” The second section of the book, “The Map of the World,” recalls Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel (1965) and the way we come to understand home through travel. At points, however, Thayne seems to be as much a tourist in her writing as she is on the Trans-Siberian Railway or protesting at the Pershing missile site in Mutlangen, Germany. Arguably, Thayne takes some risks in deliberately embracing the cliché in lines like these from “Legend: The Map of the World”: How could we conceive of the map I was making? Even those, my grown children, full of more traveling said, “Mother, it’s scary.” Reviews 267 My halting bravado trite: “So is the ocean, but isn’t it there to be crossed?” In the final two poems of the second section,“Traveling” and “War,” Thayne concludes that it is “mortal connectedness” that “orders the comings,” “the dissolution of borders,” and “the breath of human exchange,” and that it is “only the connectedness of prayers” that “can open the skies/. . . and rechart the world.” The way that imagination, perhaps even more than empathy and faith, can overcome separation is best revealed in the third section where the writing is more immediate and lyrical. Rather than domesticating what is foreign through metaphor and enumeration, Thayne manages to blur the distinction through surreal descriptions; she becomes “more and m ore/connected to night” (“When I Died”). In the title poem, for instance, she travels into a world where “You rise without prayer in a far camp and silently hurry away,”and for the first time she finds herself “vague about familiar hands.”The floating motif recurs in “Coming Up on Lake Powell,” “One to Get Ready,” and “Nirvana,” among others. The floating is offset by literal events in other poems—a falling meteor, a felled tree, and a friend destroyed by AIDS. Yet, nothing here is permanently grounded; the felled tree creates a “confusion of shadows/and bewilderment of birds” and the book closes with an aubade celebrating the late August in every day, “stashed in crisp piles above the dust.”Emma Lou Thayne is at her best in these final poems where the sense of play and her hold on nature produce language as buoyant as...