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286 Western American Literature Native Americans are the wise and innately spiritual children of nature. Louis’s Indians, himself included, are an edgy and desperate lot who live in a country that continues to wage a campaign to strip them of their dignity. Consequently, they are given to episodes of self-loathing and self-destruction. The strongest poems in this vein are narrative and local, concerned with the travails of people who live on and around the Pine Ridge Reservation, Louis’s adopted home. But this, too, is not new. Pine Ridge has always been Louis’s Cannery Row, his Winesburg, Ohio. No, the big news here is not the subject matter but the publisher, TriQuarterly Books of Northwestern University. In 1996, Louis published a collection of ram­ bunctious short fiction, Wild Indians and Other Creatures, with the University of Nevada Press; so it appears that he, once a hero of the feisty small-press scene, is gaining a measure of academic respectability. Which is not to say that he has toned down his rhetoric in order to sell himself to a new audience. This is the same Adrian C. Louis, the man who suffers from “dick-chilling nightmares,” who writes of the morning craving for “a shot of whiskey” and “a wet dream,” and who notes the “puke-stained” interiors of cars on the reservation. The universities’ sudden discovery of Louis is implausible, as if Bukowski had been asked to lecture on poetics at some stuffy M.F.A. program. Could this mean that doctoral candidates, along with responding to the postmodern exu­ berances of such native writers as Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, and Gerald Vizenor, will soon be expected to follow Louis as he cruises Pine Ridge—stop with him at the post office, where he trips over a snoring drunk, continue on to Big Bat’s Conoco Station and Mini-Mart to stock up on junk food and nonalco­ holic beer, and then join him at home, on his couch, to watch the Redskins “grunt-tussle against the Chiefs”? Actually, students—all of us—could do worse than pay attention to Louis’s blunt, in-your-face reports on the anything-butromantic state of reservation affairs. PAUL HADELLA Southern Oregon State College Facing the Music. By Bruce Berger. (Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1995. 50 pages, $10.00.) The range of music faced is the range of life experiences; the tempo may vary, the themes may vary, but the constant is the word play, the wit. The closed verse forms and true and near rhyme please in the manner of repeated musical phrasings. The word play is as in “playing” music and not, therefore, superficial or frivolous, even when witty, as in “Money: A Primer” where money, once freed from literal barter, takes on a life of its own which we no longer understand: Reviews 287 “For instance, no Frenchman/ Ever communicated with a franc/ The way francs speak to marks with perfect comprehension.” To more serious purpose, just as Stevens’s Peter Quince tells us that “music is feeling then not sound,” so here, in the poem “Enigma Variations,” a man recalling how he has tried since boyhood to understand loss caused by death concludes that “The master tune . . ./ Is memory,/ All sound mere variation.” In the same way, the title poem shows the faithful concertgoer noticing the evolution of temporal particulars within the orchestra (maturing prodigies, changing conductors, gender and racial composition), all within the constant of music, until finally the concertgoer no longer occupies his familiar seat and “The baton rises for the next listener there.” JAMES R. SAUCERMAN Northwest Missouri State University Dawn Pearl. By Irene Chadwick. (Modesto, California: Ietje Kooi Press, 1994. 41 pages, $9.50.) This first collection is one of tremendous energy, with images ranging from the mundane (clothes pin dolls and Cream of Wheat) to the extraordinary (blank Limoges china and jacaranda). The thirty-one poems have great geographic range as the poet moves easily from California and Iowa to Israel and the Bahamas before coming back, full circle, to California again. Poems located in the West—“China Walls,” “Beaches: Point Reyes,” “Path of the Padres,” “Walking Up Wildcat Canyon...

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