The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems by John Haines (review)

168 WesternAmerican Literature friend ofBernadette, Starr, who “used to be a big time clothes model... in New York City,” is married to Rounder Stubbs, a boozy country singer who lives in comparative splendor in Dulce, New Mexico. Although Starr arguably provides a white person’s perspective in the novel, her character never rings as true, never achieves the complexity, and never piques the imagination as does Gracie’s. This minor criticism notwithstanding, The Death ofBernadette Lefthand is a fine, engaging novel. Querry’s mystery is defdy written, entertaining, packed with information, and deserves to be read. ROBERT HEADLEY Southern State Community College, Ohio Iona Moon. By Melanie Rae Thon. (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993. 315 pages, $ 21.00.) Iona Moon, gutsy protagonist of Melanie Rae Thon’s new novel, resembles no one as much as an updated, Idaho Huckleberry Finn. Moon, despite the limitations of growing up in a family of provincial potato farmers, celebrates both her own life and the lives of two significant male others. She is sensitive, courageous, and independent, nursing her mother dying ofcancer and nurtur­ ing her few cherished friends, making subtle moral choices as she matures. Thon’s prose veers between lyricism and a stark naturalist portrayal of a world of potato fields and petty small town lives. In a fictional world of sexual and spiritual abuse, the narrative avoids the postmodernist nihilist trap, insist­ ing on the possibility that events might signify meaning. As Moon whispers in a dream sequence, “It is the wounded heart that makes us human in the end, my love. ” Only the ending jars, when the narrative focus shifts abruptly to another character. Narrative momentum prepares the reader for a conclusion focused on Moon herself. In fact, the final phrases sound melodramatic: “you either kill yourself, or you fly.”But on the whole, this is a novel to re-read and treasure for its complex representations and poetic language. SUSAN ELIZABETH GUNTER Westminster College ofSalt Lake City The Owl in the Mask oftheDreamer: CollectedPoems. ByJohn Haines. (Saint Paul, Minnesota: GraywolfPress, 1993. 251 pages, $25.00.) The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer not only resists quick study, but often resists being treated as a book. Reading it straight through is like jogging through the Louvre. In thisway,John Haines’swork stands apart from the year’s Reviews 169 collected-and-selected ranks. Likewise, in the cozy, anxious jostle of American poetry, Haines doesn’t march; hiswork has a lonely self-sufficiencythat seems to unnerve the shelvers and dusters. Despite readership and major prizes, he is seldom found in the hauteanthologies. Graywolf Press, though, is known for risky books. The Owl in the Mask ofthe Dreamercollects from nine previous titles—Winter News, The Stone Harp, Twenty Poems, Leaves and Ashes, In Five Years’Time, Cicada, In a Dusty Light, Newsfrom the Glacier, and New Poems, 1980-88—and finishes with new and uncollected work, summing Haines’s poetic life. Born in 1924, Haines studied art, then went to Alaska and lived for twenty years, partly by hunting and trapping. Since then, with his homestead as base, he has written and taught. His two prose books (Living Off the Country, 1981, and The Stars, The Snow, The Fire, 1989) are both distinctive and aloof, and his book reviews arrive like flung harpoons. Though his poems have a lovely, grave music, Haines is not demonstrative in style: his texture is smooth, his line restrained, and his mood predominantly severe. Deep in the book, the poems unfold with longer lines and complex reference, but never lose their insistent edge. A lyric poet in the oldest sense, Haines faces the absolute, whether as figure, as landscape, or as emptiness. One escape is to tag him a “nature” poet. Yet having worked and lived outside, I find him otherwise. These poems are accurate in treating natural things, but are fiercely self-absorbed, internalized until their images no longer stand outside poetic voice. A look at Gary Snyder’s poems shows the reach between his direct, companionable engagement and what Haines does instead: a kind of réanimation. In cities, Haines walks the galleries; his newest poems improvise on Bosch, Goya, Rodin, Giacometti, Hartley, and...