Dawn Pearl by Irene Chadwick (review)

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”—where the poet shows herself to be at home amid the elderberries, wild oats, and star thistles, among the cliff swallows, red-eared slider turtles, and killdeer, are among the collection’s most successful. The unforgettable inhabitants of Chadwick’s poems—whether they are her father, grandmother, or the Yokut Indians—are rendered vividly through detail. “Tied thumb-to-thumb,” she writes, “Yokut Indians/ tramped a Trail of Tears up/ Arroyo de Los Banos Del Padre-Arroyo/ over the Diablo Range.” By poem’s end, modem day canyon travelers are as vulnerable. Their future, and ours, has been thrown into question. Jean McKeon renders the poems in a variety of elegant calligraphic styles. MARY K. STILLWELL University of Nebraska, Omaha ...