All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems by Walter McDonald (review)

Reviews 283 (about sixpages each) sometimesforces dangerouslyreductive generalizations. While the editors’introductions demonstrate familiaritywith major scholarship in the area ofliterature and the environment, theirbook’sgenerality—aswell as its lack of a bibliography and index—prevents it from being a substantial contribution to that scholarship. The Literature ofNature does fill a particular niche in the current field of anthologies, but readers will want to identify that niche very carefully. The extensive introductory and bibliographical materials of Thomas Lyon’s This IncomperableLande (1989) make it a better choice for those interested primarily in American nature writing. Readers whose focus is nature poetry will want to look at Christopher Merrill’s TheForgotten Language (1991) or Robert Pack and Jay Parini’sPoemsfor a SmallPlanet (1993). Those wishing to read contemporary nature writing should try Peter Sauer’s Finding Home (1992), John Murray’s Nature’s New Voices (1992), or Thomas Lyon and Peter Stine’s On Nature’s Terms (1992). Students of nature writing by women will do better with Lorraine Anderson’s Sisters of the Earth (1991) or Karen Knowles’s Celebrating the Land (1992). Teachers planning to bring the literature ofnature to the composition classroom will prefer Scott Slovic and Terrell Dixon’sBeing in the World (1993). Readers most concerned about the representative environmental writing of a particular region or bioregion are advised to seek out one of the spate of new regional anthologies such as those edited byjohn A. Murray. Robert Finch and John Elder’s The Norton Book ofNature Writing (1990) is more comprehensive and lessexpensive, butitdoes lackthevarious historical introductions included in The Literature of Nature. For those wishing to combine the literary study of British and American nature writing, however, Begiebing and Grumbling’s bookmaybe agood choice (especiallysince ThePoetry ofEarth, agood collection ofEnglish nature writing, is long out ofprint). MICHAEL BRANCH Florida International University All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems. ByWalter McDonald. Photographs from The Southwest Collection selected byJanet M. Neugebauer. (Lubbock: Texas Tech, 1993. 143 pages, $21.50.) It is difficult to define the term authentic, especiallywhen it comes to verse. Ifthe authentic is the “real,”then the term can only be known byone who has experienced the sights, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells described in the writing. But even to the uninitiated reader, Walter McDonald’s poems should ring true as an anvil struck hard in the heat of a Lamesa afternoon. The landscape ofthese workswill, in Laurence Perrine’sterms, “create experience.” All That Matters breathes with a dust-filled spirit of place. One acquainted with Elmer Kelton’s The Time it Never Rained should keep McDonald’s book handyforintermissionsin the droughts—for trips to thewater pump, ifithasn’t gone dry. The starkness of McDonald’s Comanche terrain is revealed in flat 284 Western American Literature understated lines. The poems, like the landscape, are not plush but full of scorpions and rattlesnakes. No overt sentimentality here. The constructs are visceral, made of real “things”; they occupy space and have weight. Rhetorical overtones emanate only from the weather, the land, the animals, and the plainspeople. I’ve seen her pose a skull on a barrel cactus she has cultured in sand like caliche, the pulp thorns sprouting like bristles on the waxy face of a husband. “Memento Mori” For those who have known McDonald’sdry microcosm only at seventy miles per hour, this dust-filled scape is sinister, foreboding. But to those who have called it a home, a touchstone in reality, it has the power to nurture and to heal. Having returned to West Texas after the Viet Nam conflict, I too have felt the healing movements of a fine horse muscling quick turns below me in a blinding white afternoon. I identify with McDonald’s horseback veteran in “After the Flight Home from Saigon,”who catalogues that “rage for order on the plains,/ barbed wires from post to post.”In this piece, as in most of the others in All That Matters, McDonald subordinates the rhetorical and the didactic to his sensuous artifacts. There is no excess in line or image. “This is the grace of hardscrabble,/ prairie where no trees grow native,/nothing sweet the old serpent/can dangle from a...