Desert Wood: An Anthology of Nevada Poets ed. by Shaun T. Griffin (review)

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 the imagery. STACY GILLETT COYLE University ofMaryland Desert Wood: An Anthology of Nevada Poets. Edited by Shaun T. Griffin (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991. 250 pages, $14.95.) The unwary reader is likely to approach this anthology expecting a thin volume of regional poetry extolling the virtues of sagebrush, rainless clouds, and abandoned mining towns. What one finds is the diverse work of 49 poets, born between 1899 and 1962, each represented by 1 to 17 selections, whose poetic subjects span the globe: a prayer wheel in Nepal, the neon offense called Las Vegas, and a dead snake lying in a desert gully are within a few minutes’ reading time of each other. The biographical headnotes explain the puzzling variety: it seems hardly anyone is born in or dies in Nevada. People move into the state, stay long enough to found a small press or a poetry group, and then leave for greener pastures. This makes the definition of “Nevada poet”problem­ atic, but it also increases the poetic gene pool, prevents incestuous inbreeding, 268 Western American Literature and produces the healthy variety of verse offspring that we find in Desert Wood. The result is a pleasant sense of drama and expectation as one turns the page from one poet to the next. While no clear “Nevada theme” emerges from Desert Wood, the book does serve as a brief history of the state’s poetry. Reading the biographical blurbs, one notices groups forming around mentors (high school and college teachers, early poets), locales (northern Nevada poets, southern Nevada poets), and geographies (desert poets, city poets). The book leaves the impression not only of a flourishing regional poetry but of a poetry with a history, perhaps even a discernible historical development from the older work (characterized by west­ ern emotional reserve applied to such topics as the local flora and fauna, the passing of time and history, and the neighbors) to the newer work (character­ ized by contemporary emotional openness on such topics as the artistic process, the encroachment of civilization on the desert, and the anguished psyches of friends and relatives). The book attests to an active history of poetry workshops and readings, small presses, and local artists’ groups laboring together in obscurity to keep the verse alive. Desert Wood does what it should do: it introduces the reader to the state’s poets; reveals a neglected group of artists; broadens the reader’s sense of what poetry is and where it comes from; and once again makes us question the received canon, for there is so much good...