In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviews 267 Cummings, school janitor/disciplinarian, pig farmer, and amazing healer of man and beast. However, most other townspeople have concentrated humanity’s usual eccentricity to a painfully comic pungency. The other creatures, great and small, mainly contribute to the human pain and the comedy. Awakened by cats fighting under her bedcovers, a townswoman reacts. “Neighbors came running/ thought it was a tragedy/ her being raped or dying/ they wanted to see” (“Vera”). Her bared cancer-swollen abdomen was a dis­ tracting revelation. My Town is a hard-assed place. But people are not indiffer­ ent. Rough affection and concern shape the neighborliness. The poems of My Town, whether howlers, groaners, or serious, build tales tall enough to stand with the other timber of American regionalism. Lee writes his poems in a created language that echoes any expressive folk who wear their education lightly. Sometimes, townspeople’s care for precision (“She has to have/ a hystericalalectomy for women” [“Faith Tuttle”]) places them as much in the company of Mesdames Malaprop and Slipslop as of Sut Lovingood, moving us beyond regionalism. Stylistically, Lee’s energy of phrasing rests upon fluid unaccented syllables, proportioned so that accents carry a disproportionate weight, reflective of what William Carlos Williams called the “variable foot.” All this skill creates risk. An unsophisticated narrator can ring hollow. However, these poems have a solid thump. The style’s compelling wryness con­ trols pain with laughter, but does not block it. Look closely: the townspeople travel dangerous roads carrying dangerous loads, get hung up on barbed wire fences in lightning storms, and shoot or bum themselves, besides suffering from greed, sex, cancer, and other less voluntary or accidental afflictions. They some­ times laugh, afterwards. We do, too. My Town is an interesting place. Go look it over. DALE K. BOYER Boise State University Archipelago. By Arthur Sze. (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1995. 86 pages, $12.00.) Arthur Sze’s poems unfold with an unparalleled richness of imagery and a force that doesn’t proceed from any single device, logical or poetic. Perhaps our finest American translator of Chinese poems, he’s been married to a Hopi weaver, lived and taught in Santa Fe, and traveled widely, and has a great, earned wealth of reference. Thus, without pretense, a single poem may draw on a hike in mountains of New Mexico, mushroom lore, a journey through China, Hopi ritual, sexual love, and the preparation of food. 268 Western American Literature While Sze’s spaciousness exerts a strong outward force, Archipelago reads as one. But it isn’t a linear, genre-driven work, like a travelogue or quest, or a thematic exercise: rather, imagine shaking out a thick, wool rug against the morning light. Each flap creates a galaxy of bright dust, followed by complex swirling and settling. These poems are beautiful in that very immediate way, and equally hard to define. While Sze’s poems are visual and sensual, words such as collage or mon­ tage don’t serve, since he never treats the poem as a flat, verbal plane. In “Axolotl,” he writes: I may practice divination with the bones of an eel, but the world would be just as cruel were it within my will. The yellowing leaves of the honey-locust would still be yellowing, and a woman riding in a hearse would still grieve and grieve. We don’t live in a hypothetical world, and yet the world would be nothing without hypothetical dreaming. I hope no ultimate set of laws to nature exists; maybe, instead, there’s only layering. Maybe you look in a store window and see twenty-four televisions with twenty-four images: now the explosion of a napalm bomb, now the face of an axolotl. The poems in Archipelago are like complex equations, without signs. This corresponds to the lack of explicit grammar—as we know it in English—in ideo­ graphic Chinese, where signs merge and clash and repeat. As the poet tests the fit of these two great linguistic traditions, the tone and timing of his repetition creates an incremental structure, and his range of juxtaposition excites a com­ plex resonance. The active mixing of so many elements...

pdf

Share