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2 2 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 8 Ludlow: A Verse-Novel. By David Mason. Los Angeles, C A : Red H en Press, 2007. 232 pages, $18.95. Reviewed by Maria O’Connell Texas Tech University, Lubbock In his afterword to Ludlow, David Mason says that “anyone who writes narrative verse will confront a version of the following question: Why didn’t youjust write it in prose?” (227). He proceeds to give several justifications for his use of verse. In the case of this book, Mason’s view of verse as “often more cinematic than prose in its rhythms and images, its narrative economy” is justification enough (228). The verse in this novel gives a sense of motion and sight to the story of the 1914 Ludlow massacre, drawing the reader into the hopelessness and fear surrounding life in the mines. Ludlow is a work of historical fiction, bringing to life the events which sur­ rounded the 1913 strike of coal miners in Huerfano and Las Animas counties in Colorado and their eventual massacre by the Colorado state militia. Mason has interwoven historical characters and events with a nanative story about a fictional orphan, Luisa Mole. Luisa is the daughter of a Mexican mother and a Welsh dynamiter named John Mole. The story opens with the chapter “La Huerfana,” the story of Luisa’s daily life and the loss of her father in a mining accident. With beautiful economy, Mason gives a description of Mole’s death. The coroner knew when they had brought him down whose stunned remains these were, his limbs intact, his face the face of a man who only slept, internal organs jellied by the blast that knocked him through the thin wall of the mine. “It finally got John Mole,” he said. “Jesus, I never thought I’d see you bring him in.” And Too Tall Macintosh was almost crying. (27) In addition to Luisa’s story, the principal story is the account of Louis Tikas, an immigrant bom Ilias Spantidakis in Loutra, Greece.Louis becomes a miner to make enough money to survive and is quickly caught up in themove­ ments to unionize the miners and improve their working conditions. Louis is a historical character, one of the strike leaders and one of those killed in the massacre, but Mason has fleshed out the little known of his life and given him both a lover and a voice to express the feelings of the miners, doubly burdened by being laborers and immigrants. He missed the smell of grass in autumn rain, the sacks of dripping goat cheese hung from rafters, the words like thalassa and ourands that felt to him much weightier than English. Words in American were cardboard words, B o o k R e v ie w s 2 2 5 cast-offs of language naming nothing real. Something was wrong here, something very wrong with a people who could never sing for joy. (141) David Mason has brought the ugly and senseless disaster of Ludlow to life in this novel. The use of verse, the sheer beauty of the language, makes the story haunting and terribly real. Having seen the Ludlow memorial and wondered about the people named there, I appreciate Mason’s imagination and his truth. h ...

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