Journeyman’s Wages by Clemens Starck (review)

Reviews 271 em tanager above Bear Lake, the varied saguaros, all are grist for her magical mill. Nature, larger and even more varied, reveals that Swenson is not just a regional poet, but a universal one. This collection contains ten previously unpublished poems, dated from 1952 to 1984. It is arranged in graceful themat­ ic units and has a useful index, containing dates for the poems. Of the new poems, “Incantation,” written in 1952, reveals the power of a mature poet with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s command of words and sprung rhythms, particularly the penultimate stanza: Burning snow spin me so with black sea to braided be In green sleep eons leap from gray slime past thought and time to pith and power to bathe in the immortal hour to breathe from another pulsing flower Occasionally her world seems almost too perfect: in “Camping in Madera Canyon,” for example, we wish for an occasional mosquito. This is a book of surprises. Of all the fine twentieth-century western writ­ ers, it is Swenson who has most clearly moved from region to eternity. In the tra­ dition of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and Bishop, she merges the human with the physical world in almost seamless fashion. Hers is a baroque world, sometimes more visually than aurally successful. Her poems arranged for the page, as “How Everything Happens (Based on the Study of a Wave),” while clever, are perhaps not as successful as her more lyrical, musical poems, like “Still Turning.” But the reader must take her slowly, poem by poem, as there will be some­ thing to please every taste in this all-encompassing collection. One, “Water Picture,” is almost perfect in its conflation of art and nature as Swenson takes a Monet-like view of the pond in the park, where “all things are doubled” and the swan, kissing herself, makes the scene troubled: “water-windows splinter,/ treelimbs tangle, the bridge/ folds like a fan.” SUSAN E. GUNTER Westminster College of Salt Lake City Journeyman’ s Wages. By Clemens Starck. (Brownsville, Oregon: Story Line Press, 1995. 65 pages, $10.95.) It is appropriate for a poet who has worked in such diverse jobs as con­ struction foreman, merchant seaman, and newspaper reporter that his first book celebrate the equal worth of labor. Whether describing the operations of a poet 272 Western American Literature or of a mechanic, Clemens Starck’s poems discover a like respect for the duty, care, and vision of a craftsman. For the thoughtful worker, wages are not mon­ etary alone, but poetic and philosophic. In section one, Starck founds his poetics through a sustained comparison of poetry and construction work. The first poem, “Willamette River, Marion St. Bridge: Pier 5, General Details,” invests the erection of concrete forms with metaphysical significance. Addressing the readers as “companions of duty,” he asks whether we are all like the concrete piers his crew is pouring, “packed in these heavy bodies, dumbfounded.” Surrounded by roaring machines and the movement of dull earth, he pertinaciously affirms humanity’s higher nature. Like Hart Crane, Starck responds to an indifferent universe using the image of a bridge, but whereas Crane invests the Brooklyn Bridge with significance through the accumulation of cultural associations, Starck simplifies, finding in the object and the labor which produced it sufficient cause for reverence. In “Slab on Grade,” Starck develops this view further by illuminating the process of pouring a concrete slab. “For years people will walk on it,” he writes, “hardly considering that it was put there/ on purpose,/ on a Thursday in August/ by men on their knees.” Here, and in his other poems, he offsets his sympathy for fellow craftsmen with a distrust of the larger culture. As he writes in “Raising the Grain,” “The country is/ going to hell, but a good mechanic/ can always find work.” In the final three sections, Starck expands the range of his topics to include other aspects of his life. Drawing from his experiences as a father, a middle-aged man, a student of Chinese poetry, or a resident of Oregon, he brings to each sub­ ject the same candor and clean, spare language that make reading his work a...