All Manner of Wild by Eric Walter (review)

W A L 3 3 (1 } SPRING 1 9 9 8 “Jury Duty,” for example, Gildner provides the history of the table at which six lawyers in “sober business suits that fit” “arrange their papers.” He invites us to see the “long finely whorled oak,” the truth of nature, and his own life within nature. In the midst of worry about erosion, a nuthatch’s tracks open Gildner to memories of his grandmother, “Lavina.” Gildner’s collection, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize, accomplishes the paradoxical. W hile these poems allow for the appreciation of the moment, they also accommodate the knowledge of loss. Even as joyful celebrations of life and relationship, poems such as “The Stone,” “C ol­ lecting Cowpies,” and “Song: One Summer Afternoon in the Country” allude to Sisyphus, the circle of nature, the winter that has just passed and will surely come again. Other poems are more direct: mourning father, grandfather, a boyhood friend, the passing of youth when a boy practiced baseball on the cinders in the back alley and took the world into his glove. As Gildner stands amazed at the particularities of his own life, we are enjoined to turn and look more closely at our own. We are, he reminds us, all on “The Trail”; “this walk / we share / and share / again.” All Manner of Wild. By Eric Walter. Golden, Colorado: Longhand Press, 1995. 98 pages, $10.00. Reviewed by Jim H arris Hobbs, New Mexico Eric W alter’s book All Manner of Wild came at the right time for me. I read his narrative poems of his exciting trip through A laska ten years after I had spent time hiking in Denali National Park and fishing along the Kenai River. In addition, I happened to read his book while I was in a remote campsite on Taurus Mesa in the Big Bend country of far west Texas, a stark landscape about as far from the lushness of Alaska as one can get and still be in the United States. Walter, his wife, and a friend took a sometimes-dangerous journey through Alaska’s central Brooks Range, and All Manner of Wild contains poems chronicling their experiences backpacking through an awesome and inspiring country. In his prologue, Walter writes that the poems are “a record of days, events, and impressions.” I like several things about the book. First, Walter’s individual poems such as “Denali,” “A t Frontier’s Edge,” “A Critical Passage,” and “Home Stretch” provide a narrative of some interesting time in the journey. Yet taken as a whole, the book creates one narrative with its own tensions and conflicts apart from those of individual poems. I found myself looking forward B o o k R e v ie w s to the next poem to see what would come after the last rapid or after an encounter with a grizzly. I also like Walter’s idea that narrative does spring from landscape, that certain geographies embody stories, even important or mythic stories, if the traveler will only listen. Walter acknowledges the inspi­ ration of Barry Lopez’s writings about Alaska; it was Lopez who wrote elo­ quently about the interplay of landscape and narrative in Arctic Dreams. Furthermore, I like Walter’s control of imagery. In “Rain-Simple” he writes, “we slither through storm and valley, / yammering at bears that might exist, / with Indian bells on bony hands / and crazy voice chanting hope.” Finally, I like the flat realism and the proselike style of many of the poems in All Manner of Wild, which is printed on handsome text paper with a goodlooking cover and a photograph of the Brooks Range at the end of the book. A good poetry chapbook ought to be focused, one in which the writer maintains a narrative or develops a complex theme or centers on a partic­ ular metaphor. It seems to me that many small poetry presses would profit from insisting on some type of focus from their authors. Longhand Press in Golden, Colorado, has published such an enjoyable book from Eric Walter, a Colorado poet who takes the reader on an exciting journey through a beautiful part of Alaska. Windmills...