Lethal Frequencies by James Galvin (review)

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, in poems of family, wildlife, local character, is to provide a de-romanticized but not unmagical view of small town western life: “Among the things I cease to be is cowboys.” TOM LYNCH University of Southern Colorado Lethal Frequencies. By James Galvin. (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Pross, 1995. 62 pages, $11.00.) This fourth collection of poems by James Galvin comes three years after The Meadow, his deservedly acclaimed prose treatment of the southeastern Wyoming/Colorado border country. Although Galvin has taught at universities in Kentucky, California, Iowa, and Montana, his poetry in Lethal Frequencies and three earlier volumes—Imaginary Timber (1980), God’ s Mistress (1984), Reviews 277 and Elements (1988)—consistently reflects the same area of the West as The Meadow, including his home country around Boulder Ridge and Sheep Creek, with its isolation, sometimes harsh beauty, and independent residents. Because of Galvin’s accomplishments as a poet over the last twenty years, readers of The Meadow should also be drawn to his poetry. Reading Lethal Frequencies and the earlier collections, along with The Meadow, illuminates the shaping of a writer’s art and outlook through kinship with a piece of western country and the inevitable changes it undergoes, which have always formed a strong theme in the region’s writing. And along with interest in the works them­ selves, there is value in seeing the way prose and poetry rooted in Boulder Ridge become not regional color but universal literature. Galvin’s poems in Lethal Frequencies vary in length, form, and subject. The shortest is two lines, the longest five pages. Some are straightforward, while oth­ ers can be elliptical and riddle-like. There are childhood memories, explorations of country and character, love poems, considerations of spirituality, philosophi­ cal inquiries, and always views of nature and its relationship to human life. Intellectuality in some poems is mixed with others centered on ordinary, day-today concerns of ranchers and back-country residents. In keeping with the vol­ ume’s title, a sense of mortality appears frequently in the poems—the death of older friends and neighbors, the loneliness of survivors, abrupt changes of sea­ son in high country, ravages of floods and blizzards, the loss of land and older ways of life and values. James Galvin’s work reveals much about a writer’s evolving relationship to place . .. and about the literary art he has created from it in prose and poetry. ROBERT RORIPAUGH University of Wyoming Changing Seasons and other poems. By John E. Smelcer. (Berrima, Australia: South Head Press, 1995. 61 pages, $10.00.) John Smelcer’s poems are painterly and precise. One of the tasks of plein air poetry is to capture a moment and give it clear meaning. Smelcer succeeds admirably in poems such as “Late...