Ordinary Messengers by Michael Hannon, and: The Raven Wakes Me Up by Stephan Torre (review)

Reviews 277 but in ways at once more personal and more historical. Wallis has a stronger bent for the rhyme traditional to cowboy poetry though she uses free verse more frequently. Her poetry of cattle culture tends toward narrative, and at times, as her book’s title suggests, it translates western experience into Nordic myth—see her “Invocation”of Odin on his “oct-shod bronc”or “War Horse,”where “In my dreams I ride war horses/Deep bay Belgians big with dignity” (that second line my favorite in the book).Though the speaker of “Invocation”may “much prefer a/Fighting God” to a “wimpy, singing Muse,”the poet can take much care with small details of song (like the alliteration of “Beneath the burden/O f carried coffins”in “Where Old Ones Die”).Wallis also attends to women’s private pains (“Mamie”) and social pleasures (“Girlfriends”) in land dominated by men, and in “A Thousand Pretty Ponies” she offers a classic Montana cowboy poem in rhymed quatrains. Dry Crik Press should be applauded for bringing more cowboy poetry into print, but these books could be improved with numbered pages and biographi­ cal notes on the poets—and, in the case of The Exalted, One, with its several scrambled pages, more diligence in assembly. MICHAEL L.JOHNSON University ofKansas Ordinary Messengers. By Michael Hannon. (Point Reyes Station, California: Float­ ing Island, 1991. 88 pages, $10.00.) The Raven Wakes Me Up. By Stephan Torre. (Point Reyes Station, California: Floating Island, 1992. 42 pages, $8.00.) Within the last year and a half, publisher Michael Sykes has brought out two of the most passionate poets writing in the West, and perhaps in the entire country. I may be reaching for it, but I read Hannon as representative of the Catholic West and Torre of the Protestant landscape. Had I more copy space I could extrapolate on this idea; discuss thematic differences: the books are counterpoint to each other in content and poetic strategy. They are unalike in vision and voice, but alike in intellectual toughness and finish. Michael Hannon writes with a sardonic intensity: brief, compressed asides onJesus, God and the Void. The poet is our contemporary Pascal with, however, a Beckett-like sense of humour. The title of the collection is ironic—the author is no ordinary messenger. I might add, and I have a suspicion that this was intentional, that the first letters in each of the title words form the Tantric syllable om. (The late Kenneth Rexroth said, on the back cover of Hannon’s earlier book, Poems & Days, “A very good poet indeed, and certainly one of the few Tantric writers in any language who is both profound and witty.”) Ordinary Messengersis divided into six sections. Here are two poems, the first from “Stations,” called “Simon is Forced to Carry the Cross”: 278 Western American Literature This could be any one of us: culled from the botched multitude, dragged cursing in the wake of an ambitious god, and made to shoulder His perfection’s dead weight. Hating it, loving it, hating it. . . The second poem, “The Muse,” comes from the “Slender Means”section: I don’t go to her, she comes to me, red with unspeakable crimes and her hair is a black wind annihilating worlds to get at the door in my bed. It takes forever to get her clothes off, and I don’t have forever. If I have a quarrel with Hannon’s work, it is a small one—I would like to hear more news of the outside world and the society where he gets his living as a painting contractor. But this may be asking him to be another kind of poet than he is. Stephen Torre, on the other hand, in The Raven Wakes Me Up, embraces the world “out there” with gusto. His phenomenological purchase is that of men working together, or in isolation, and of their women, or lack of women. Torre brings us news from Montana, northern California and British Columbia. He has worked as a logger and in mills; has farmed and ranched. Most of the poems in the book are too long to quote in full for this...