Repairs: Poems, and: Macho Camacho's Beat, and: Working Lives: The Southern Exposure History of Labor in the South (review)

134 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW REVIEWS G. E. Murray, Repairs: Poems. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1979. 96pp. $8.50. Luis Rafael Sánchez, Macho Camacho's Beat. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. 210pp. $10.95. Marc S. Miller (ed.), Working Lives: The Southern Exposure History of Labor in the South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. 414pp. $7.95 Brecht once confessed to his friend Benjamin a recurring fantasy, in which he was hauled before a political tribunal and forced to answer a fatal question: was he truly being earnest with his work? His reply in the daydream bears directly enough on the issues raised in this review to be worth quoting in full: I would have to admit that no, I'm not completely in earnest. I think too much about artistic problems, you know, about what is good for the theatre, to be completely in earnest. But having said 'no' to that important question, I would add something still more important: namely, that my attitude ispermissible.' Immediately, one wants to agree with Brecht's opinion here, and not only as it regards his own work. Knowing the whole grim history of censorship and repression in the nations ofactually existing socialism, the litany of names from Olesha in Russia to Cabrera Infante and Lezama Lima in Cuba, one wants to insist that the appeal to art, the "permissible" defense, must always be viewed as a legitimate one against the apparatchiks. Yet within the context of late capitalism and the confines of the United States, the question must be formulated somewhat differently for those who write from a committed marxist (or marxist-feminist) stance: Within a land where any and all literary practices are permitted (if not all encouraged), a country in which the artist or writer is a peripheral, clownish figure, and within a realm of literary practices, conventions, and definitions whose express tendencies are to affirm and extend the primacy of the aesthetic over the referential, the "literary" over the "political," how is the committed writer to be successfully earnest at all? A close look at a recent Devins Award-winning volume of poems, G. E. Murray's Repairs, begins to give us some sense of the magnitude of this problem for the committed writer, though Murray is certainly not one himself. Indeed, his work in Repairs is enlightening to us here precisely in its blatent embrace of literary permissibility as a generative poetical principle. Repairs is a fat book, as poetry volumes go these days—54 poems, including several long works and cycles, crammed closely onto its % pages—and its generous length seems a function of the thrilling, inconsequent ease with which the poems slide over the eye and through the mind. Murray has a fine ear and a smart facility for line breaks, and engages his gifts in the service of a slack, easy Stevensian free play of language and landscape. The result is a sort of poetry machine which seems equally capable of delicious, insubstantial pronouncements ("In a democracy of soil/ Only the bushwacked caucus"), precious, exact geographic evocations (as in "Gulls in Gloucester Harbor" or "New Orleans, October's First Sunday"), and even, occasionally, a poem steeped in the sense of the surreally-charged, commodity-full space between ourselves and the Others who surround us and are surrounded themselves in this atomized, irradiated world: young American Cheese, "a figure swept/ By sunshine toward the free fall/ Terror in her heart," or the unnamed man at the counter of a diner in central Indiana whose insides riot as he eats: ...... Several inches beneath his skin there are musicians with arthritic fingers, hordes ofaccomplished clarinets, twin pianos 135 REVIEWS like lobster claws, melodies from a soundless culture. Only the neat, golden fields ofthe Indiana hear them, and waltz furiously out ofstep, like a row of pom-pom girls drunk on the promise ofcherry cokes and the coach's good looks. (from "Sketch for a Morning in Muncie, Indiana") This last kind of poem, with its crazed soulful seriality, a marvel of cracked images and fractured, furious joy, was the kind of work that first made me interested in Murray; but its sonorous, empty cohorts in Repairs...