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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 pleasurable labor. MICHAEL BERNDT Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Prayers for the Dead Ventriloquist. By D. J. Smith. (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1995. 74 pages, $8.95.) Lyric poetry, like prayer, appears outmoded in this era of the corporate megaphone; and yet today good lyric verse proliferates, especially out West. Boise State’s Ahsahta Press has contributed to the promotion of these new voic­ es by publishing a first collection by Fresno poet D. J. Smith. Using a palette composed of light and rain, as well as an eye sharpened by experiences in teach­ ing and counseling, Smith has created a quiet, harrowing universe in which the anonymity of mid-life is mirrored in the suffering faces of small-town America. The title of the collection, from a poem about a Chilean immigrant, might also refer to the narrator’s father, who resurfaces frequently, and whose silence Reviews 273 casts a pall of “iridescent light” over the poet. Smith’s poems—about his veter­ an brother, the girl raped beneath an overpass, his paraplegic neighbor—teach us that this light is at once “a sickness” and a harbinger of hope. One wonders, however, how heartfelt this hope is. Like Smith’s highly crafted style, which shies from the rough honesty of everyday speech, the content veers away from confession. What a relief it is then to hear him burst out: “Christ, I’m tired of this/... the cities/All boxed and the same/ the days that have fallen like leaves.” Offsetting the megaphone may require not simply prayers, but an angry voice. PATRICK VINCENT University of California, Davis Each Thing We Know Is Changed Because We Know It and Other Poems. By Kevin Hearle. (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1994. 53 pages, $6.95.) Let this book sit with you awhile; it grows larger through its exploration of how and what we know. For Kevin Hearle, his California home symbolizes love of and loss of place, allowing exploration of historical, political, philosophical, and environmental implications beyond its borders. Hearle’s narrative poetry recalls his California childhood, mainly through matriarchal memories. Poems evoke anomalies of Santa Ana winds whipping flames across canyons; torrential rains turning hillsides into rivers; air growing thick enough to see; asphalt crevasses opening like mouths. Given such natural and manmade causes/effects, how will future lives...

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