Simple Versions of Disaster by Jerry Bradley (review)

Reviews 271 Studebaker’s craft is solid, but this metaphor hesitates short of any real revelations except that in this everpresent blackness where a man may die by many means, perhaps none but real tunnel vision is possible. Even so, I wished for more. The above-ground half defines the characters and the landscapes in sun­ light. “Holing Through” awakens to the voices outside, and I hear the muse: That’s how I learned voices were real that they can pull me sideways through no hole at all. “Working the Surface,” “In the Dry,” and “Norma Jean” possess an ironic humor consistent with the working western culture—common men and women bigger than life, an unspoken camaraderie of sweat and fear which exudes truth. The title poem may be the masterpiece, ultimately bringing the scaven­ gers of light and dark together, with the poet, to survive at the Company Dump. The rat, hit in the head,jumps straight up out of its shadow as if it wanted a larger bite of life than it had been given. Most imagery leaves an empty pit in the belly. There is a sense of hopeless­ ness, a heavy, almost socialistic grayness, which Limberlost Press has assuaged in a handsome, colorful package. Each poem, though, offers more than what was taken out of the ground, indeed a part of the changing attitudes in the West. JOHN C. DOFFLEMYER Dry Crik Press Simple Versions ofDisaster. ByJerry Bradley. (Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 1991. 124 pages, $9.95.) The title has to be ironic. There is nothing simple about the poetry ofJerry Bradley. A reader cannot sit back and read poem after poem in the safe expectation that they will be similar—just as the narrators and subjects of his poems cannot be safe from unexpected disasters, one such as represented by the bee pictured on the cover. There is no one simple theme for the poems in this collection, but in many of them, the narrator expresses views similar to those expressed in the final stanza of “Electricity”: In the savagery of intricate circuits we all begin our nests, extinction 272 Western American Literature likely and nearby, but in knowledge that to dodge the fire means to live without the light. Part of the complexity of the work is that the persona of the narrator seems to change from poem to poem. Often the persona of the narrator seems indistinguishable from an anonymous author withdrawn from the action of the poems as in “Electricity.” Other times the narrator is a participant, sometimes young, sometimes old, sometimes male, sometimes female. The form of the poems is also complex. Some poems are closed off sharply, firmly, even humorously. Others seem tojust stop. Some have short lines, others long; some have meter and rhyme, others have a nice smooth rhythm for awhile and then jar us with lines that are both difficult to read aloud and to compre­ hend. The subject matter varies widely too. In two of the poems the narrators respond to Monet and Cezanne canvases. In others the narrators talk about farming in Texas, gambling in Las Vegas. And the diction often matches the subject matter. For example in “Counting the Commandments,” a humorous poem, the smugly naive narrator says: And when I get up there I’d be more than glad to help others get in Some folks not many miles from here are going to need a heap of helping from a boy like me Other narrators use more formal words such as lissome, ineffable, and visceral. But for the most part the diction is that ofeveryday life. And Bradley’scollection of poems are the stuff of life, dealing with most of the problems we face, expected and unexpected, having narrators more are less well able to face them, to escape them. For example we meet the man who drinks to forget, and are told: there is a message in the bottle but his tongue thickens in translation grows happy Reviews 273 and when he laughs women pass out the hole in his heart I like this poem and many others. I like their wit, their toughness, their sensitivity, their complexity...