Buying A Cabin: The Big Bear Poems by Rafael Zepeda, Gerald Locklin (review)

Reviews 275 Ants on the Melon strives, in each of its six parts, to unveil a fullness of dream, experience, delight, and disappointment. The final poem, “Take My Hand, Anna K.,” likens creativity and the blindness Adair now faces with the brilliant “roar of light” shared with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as she surrenders herself to the “wheels of Time.” The vision is as stark as it is irreversible. We are much enriched by the amplitude of this collection. JODI VARON Eastern Oregon State College Buying A Cabin: The Big Bear Poems. By Rafael Zepeda and Gerald Locklin. (South San Francisco, California: Minotaur Press, 1994. 35 pages, $6.00.) Years ago, upon seeing a collection of my poems in print, my first wife informed me that, “These aren’t poems, they’re stories.” I didn’t argue with her. I’ll take a good story any day. And so it is with this narrative sequence of twen­ ty-eight poems. This collection is about the fifth collaboration between these two long-time friends. Gerald and Ray live in Long Beach, California. On occasion they ven­ ture far from home and live to write about it. In this sequence, Gerald is not “Toad” but “Bear,” a moniker that harkens back to his very first book, Sunset Beach, 1967. Big Bear is a well-known high mountain valley about two hours east of Los Angeles, with a natural lake that has been augmented by our friends in the Army Corps of Engineers (or was it the Bureau of Reclamation?). Bears were prominent there as late as the 1920s. Here’s what the Big Bear Lake Chamber of Commerce has to say about the place: “Nestled in the San Bernardino National Forest, Big Bear offers natural beauty and an array of activities for every age and interest. This yearround [.vie] playground enjoys an annual aver­ age of 330 days of sunshine, and is home of Southern California’s largest mountain lake, three first-class ski resorts, and a wide variety of dining, shop­ ping and lodging facilities.” Enter the Bear and Ray, summer of 1985. The scenario, a true story: Gerald and Ray are English professors. Gerald is buying a cabin for weekends. Big Bear is a swamp of real estate wheelings and dealings and speculations. To level the playing field against the carpetbagging owner/real estate agent, they arrange a bit of subterfuge whereby Ray poses as an “inspector,” a friend of Gerald’s. Our heroes blunder onward! Humor, I’ve come to believe, is one of the highest aspects of art; it operates like a knife. As much as I appreciate the work being done by “language poets” and other experimentalists who treat words as a plastic medium, I am most affected by 276 Western American Literature poets who do not let the words steer the ship, who only use words as the neces­ sary conveyance of stories. This book is a masterful example. These poems are as deftly drawn as a zen ink wash. MARK WEBER Albuquerque, New Mexico How Crows Talk and Willows Walk. By Gary Esarey. (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1995. 56 pages, $6.95.) In the Afterword to his first collection of poetry, Gary Esarey, who works at Whitman College in Walla Walla, claims that “though for years suppressed below the level of daily preoccupation, poetry . .. is an old habit, an old wound, an old vice long neglected.” Having returned to the West, he has returned to poetry, and we can be grateful that he has. The poems in this collection possess a fine musicality of phrasing. The rhythms and startling syntax remind one of Gerard Manley Hopkins, e. e. cummings , and Dylan Thomas, though not (as this list suggests) foreign to his own place, but transmuted in it: Outdoors is dusty dirty rank and hot with bugs badgers bees bears—objectionable the lot— even deer may scratch or give you fleas (while a rattler wouldn’t do the latter);. . . These poems meter out a music uncommon in, but enriching to, the West. The clipped and contorted speech keeps us ever alert to the language and image of the not-quite-mundane world around us. His effort...