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230 Canadian Review of American Studies sumption of American literature. Perhaps it is merely "the times" or a jaded palate that demands the kind of reformulation offered byRob Wilson in "Producing American Selves:The Form of American Biography" (boundary 2, Summer 1991, 128):"It is time, then, to reimagine and contest the available forms of ... biography in ways that challenge the life-myths of being that globally blessed creature, that new man, the American." American Literature and the Destrnction of Knowledge remains within too monolithic a mode of knowledge to be particularly destructive. Stan Fogel University of St. Jerome's College University of Waterloo Susan Schweik.A Gulf So Deeply Cut:American Women Poets and the Second World War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Pp. xi + 385. Since Wilfred Owen's powerful works of the First World War, it seems taken for granted that war poetry rests on authentic experience: only the testimony of the combat veteran has value. But, until recently, women were unlikely to have military experience, which excluded them from writing about war except in two stances: as ''women back home," suffering from longing, and as mourner of the dead. Schweik explores important poems of the Second World War that challenged or even played with those stances. She examines assumptions about "gender, war, representation and rhetoric" that have been brought to bear on these poems and examines the circumstances of their production. The result is a study that recovers some excellent texts for our consideration and, at the same time, scrutinizes the gender ideology of war and war poetry. The author's grasp of the historical and literary context is strong. She can discuss a Yiddish poet's obscure review of a well-meaning poem on antiSemitism by Ada Jackson and tells us important things about the ethical problems of propaganda: she has the "New Historicist's" eye for the revealing anecdote. Some of the poets discussed are well know: Louise Bogan, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and H. D. [Hilda Doolittle-Ed]. The Afro-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks has a high reputation but is known best to her own community. Muriel Rukeyser's poetry is emerging recently from a long eclipse, while Edna Millay's is still deep in the darkness. Almost unknown are the works of several JapaneseAmerican poets who wrote from-and sometimes after-incarceration in camps dur- BookReviews 231 ingthe war. Their stories are particularly moving and tell us important things about racismand internal conflict within a minority group. This book would be valuable for its insights into poems alone, but it has biggerissues to deal with. The first section, "Gender and Authority in Second World War Poetry'' deals with the noncombatant writers' claim to authenticity, and it proceeds through chapters that juxtapose Marianne Moore and Randall Jarrell as warpoets, and Edna Millay and Archibald Macleish as antifascistpropagandists. The juxtapositions are good ones, though more comparisons might have been made with Jarrell's war poems. MacLeish emerges rather battered from the discussion: his intentions·were honourable but his radio plays were afflicted with patronizing stereotypes about women. The second section, "Women Poets and the Epistolary WarPoem," examines the genre of the masculine "V-1.etter'' and the superb transformationsof it by Gwendolyn Brooks and Muriel Rukeyser, two poets whose works deserve more attention than they have received. The third section, on the Nisei women poets, tells us important things about multicultural ambiguities as well as aboutthe infernment ofJapanese Americans. The materials are little known: readers willbe startled at what they learn about the ferocious pressures of the American meltingpot. Admirers of Frank Capra's movies will be surprised to learn that he encouraged "blood will tell" racism, suggesting that all Japanese are "photographic prints off the same negative." This section underlines a major point: with modem warfarethe distinction between military and civilian,not to mention the distinction betweencombat zone and home front, becomes unreal, a point made forcibly later inthe book with the discussion of H. D.'s treatment of the Blitz. High explosives tum the home front into a war zone. The fourth section, "Oblique Places," deals with Elizabeth Bishop's especiallyoblique approach to the war through a brilliant reading of her...

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