Before We Lost Our Ways by Mark Sanders (review)

Book Reviews 307 is proof: that, blazing with provocative madness, we exist!” Some of the poems have a rather easy irony, but the best— the major­ ity— are based in a grave eloquence and simultaneous modesty and assertion that is not only quintessentially central European but the crucial element of Orban’s style and vision. Before We Lost Our Ways. By Mark Sanders. Texas City, Texas: Hurakan Press, 1996. 120 pages, $9.00. Reviewed by Pat Sturm League City, Texas But The Poem is naive; it still believes that poetry makes things happen. The dissatisfied poet tears The Poem up. The sonuvabitch is going nowhere. “The Poem” Although these lines appear in Mark Sanders’s Before We Lost Our Ways, it is hard to imagine that Sanders’s poems could go nowhere. To read this volume is to know Sanders (in an almost amusing way through his “Self-Portrait”), and to know ourselves from childhood, through early loves, early work, early parenthood, and early disappointments. From the first pages, Sanders embodies honesty. He does not slather words in effete imagery, leaving the reader to ponder their meanings. Instead, Sanders has the gift for creating the perfect image to elicit from the reader an “Ah, yes, I know that moment.” Many a growing young man has left his hometown for college, returned in a pseudointellectual state, and invoked the wrath of those once-buddies who, cemented in time and space, resent any hint of change. Sanders recalls a country bar in “The Ball Game, 1975,” a long-haired graduate (“Damn, I worked hard to get that ugly”), and a trio of hot shots bent on affirming their plebeian existence. Escaping with only one blow, the graduate meets the trio in the parking lot with a long-loved baseball bat in his hands: “I took my stance for the next pitch. / They didn’t move. Then one by one / they walked, no balls, away.” O f course, love plays a starring role in Sanders’s poetry. From the flush of recognition (“The water was cold as we cupped our hands / to take a drink, and it was sweet, / as life was sweet” in “The Moments”) to the endur­ ing reality of the couple falling apart (“We stumbled out of bed into our lives. / Got dressed and failed to notice the other” in “Saga”) to the urgency of a forbidden affair (“Let there be light / to celebrate the body’s decadence. / Let the public be informed” in “Planning the Affair”), Sanders opens the secret doors of us all. 3 0 8 WAL 33(3) FALL 1998 While Sanders picks at the scabs of our lives, he wastes no time in sen­ timentality. That is, perhaps, one of his finest techniques. In never showing the tears, he evokes them. N o divorced parent can fail to connect with such lines as those from “Phoning the Children Long Distance”: ‘“Good-bye, Dad. I love you, Dad. Good-bye’ / is mortuary music, a severing benediction.” On closing the cover of Before We Lost Our Ways, one realizes that indeed, Mark Sanders does write poetry that makes things happen— inside us. Qold R ush: A Literary Exploration. Edited by M ichael Kowalewski. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1997. 477 pages, $18.48. Reviewed by Lawrence I. Berkove University of Michigan-Dearbom A wholesome counterbalance to the recent trend to “reinvent” or “reimagine” the West is Michael Kowalewski’s anthology, Gold Rush, which solidly reinforces the position that there was a historical West, with some irreducibly factual people and events. The discovery of gold in California, which, everyone knows (and is exactly reflected in the price of the book) occurred in 1848, is one of those events. It was truly epical, attracting many thousands of nineteenth-century argonauts to a quest for fabulous riches. This discovery, in turn, accelerated the grand emigration to the West that was already under way, which in turn settled the land, spurred development, founded cities, brought on the railroad, and shaped both the future of the young nation and its character. But so richly dramatic was the gold rush that it passed into legend even in its own time, and subsequent generations of authors, artists...