The Last Dust Storm by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel (review)

282 Western American Literature something, someone: “Table/ Rock, Red Desert, Creston Junction—but these/ tires can’t roll fast enough to close the gap.” “Of Place” offers the book’s most impressive descriptive passages, but it also presents the other of side of place: relocation camps, coal mines, bar-fly hunters who “bite down/ on sleeping pills and gun barrels,” and the description found in “Fragments of Americana,” of a “junkie whore/ with scabs on her knees/ who first came here/ from a high school/ beauty contest/ wanting to be a show girl.” After reading some of the book’s lighter love poems, I found these refreshingly gritty. “Of Illusion and Reflection” details the underside of contemporary life— incest, execution, aging, suicide— and offers a way out, an optimism sprung from a lifetime of experience: “The rain, late at night,/ reassures us in her hush­ ing way,/ tucks us in, and shoos away/ our daily cares.” Charles Levendosky’s poetry functions much in the same way this rain does: it takes our daily con­ cerns, acknowledges them, and comforts us with accounts of love, mystery, and light. He takes us, as he says earlier in the book, “together out of the sun’s/ and our own eclipses—/ into a gradually brightening sky.” CHRISTOPHER SINDT University of California, Davis The Last Dust Storm. By Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. (Brooklyn, New York: Hanging Loose Press, 1995. 104 pages, $20.00/$ 12.00.) Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel’s collection of poems provides a series of obser­ vations about ordinary people whose small deeds reveal greatness of character. The eighty-eight poems contained in this collection span the century and cover a geography that stretches from Texas, to Oklahoma, New Mexico, and California. Each poem presents a vignette of the life of people in rural areas, people who are confronted with everyday, ordinary situations. Yet, these simple visions of life reveal a complex canvas of individuals, ideas, and emotions that attest to McDaniel’s understanding of the people and places she describes. McDaniel’s style is reminiscent of early American Imagists; her words are simple but carefully chosen to create a specific image. Like the Imagist poets, McDaniel uses unexpected word juxtapositions, and she has the ability to create a balanced blend of the mundane and the sublime. The poem “Subject Matter” shows us the scope of the collection as it cata­ logs a few areas of interest for McDaniel’s poetry: “women/ men/ and children/ tables/ benches or broken chairs/ biscuits-cow butter/ fried eggs/ strong coffee/ . . . .” McDaniel’s poetry speaks of seemingly inconsequential acts, but her pen searches for the essence of humanity. She writes of hardships caused by the Reviews 283 times, particularly the Depression. She creates small communities of individuals and exposes their feelings in a way that is always poignant and that points to an unsophisticated and genuine approach to life. These poems ultimately form a mosaic of events that shape the lives of the working class. These events reflect the sorrow, tragedy, and humor of life, and thus they give The Last Dust Storm the feelings of universality and naked truth. MARIE-MADELEINE SCHEIN West TexasA& M University Flying over Sonny Liston. By Gary Short. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1996. 67 pages, $10.00.) Flying over Sonny Liston is Gary Short’s second full-length collection of poetry and winner of the 1996 Western States Book Award. We find here a work of great texture and feeling, a poetry that explores loss, landscape, and history with an unceasing clarity and a tenderness that never descends into sentimental­ ity. Short’s first book, Theory of Twilight, was a testament to suffering and per­ sonal history. Flying over Sonny Liston continues along this vein with many detailed explorations of loss. In “Elegy for My Mother,” Short combines lyrical description: “The moon’s/ thin yellow/ like a petal/ or a butterfly wing pinned/ against black velvet” with haunting wisdom: “the dead are not/ the sound of wind ... they are the sound of smoke.” In these two books, Short has revitalized the art of elegy, or as he says in “Wovoka,” “I have come to haunt the dead.” Short’s western world is mythic and...