Curved Like an Eye by George Perreault, and: The Country of Here Below by Wyn Cooper
1988; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1988.0072
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)American Environmental and Regional History
Resumo266 Western American Literature The poems in Oregon Message seem softer, even more thoughtful than previ ous books have been. A shadow touches most pages with age, death, meanings beyond the fingertips of the writer or the reader—darkening faces that speak of scriptures, the loss of mountains, stillborn children, the sad candles of the old, who remain young, just under the aging skin. Yet the poems retain a vital, if realistic, celebration of hope, justice, the joys of living itself. Humor remains an inherent part of the flow of words as in this excerpt from “Ode to Garlic” : You walk out generously, giving it back in a graceful wave, what you’ve been given. Like a child again, you breathe on the world, and it shines. You Must Revise Yeur Life and An Oregon Message: Poems are books full of wonder. Stafford’s prose and his poems bring with them a gentle warmth and an excitement replete with new vistas, freshly vivid perceptions of the simplest language refurbished and intensified to reveal the ways in which he sees his world—and I am left ever after subtly changed, perhaps able to see a little more of my own world. I read them both straight through, with real pleasure. Bill Stafford again proves himself not only one of America’s finest poets, but a man both wise and kind enough to share his wisdom gently, with no more pretension than the Craft demands. I recommend both books, highly. KEITH WILSON Las Cruces, New Mexico Curved Like an Eye. By George Perreault. (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1988. 59 pages, $4.50.) The Country of Here Below. By Wyn Cooper. (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1987. 40 pages, $4.50.) Landscapes of the desert Southwest—and of the more compact deserts outside urban windows—pervade the poems of George Perreault and Wyn Cooper. Both portray alienated and sometimes philosophical minds searching for love and meaning, finding them provisionally in images of the earth or in monologues and stories about desperate people. Transplanted from eastern cities (Perreault from Boston, Cooper from Detroit), both have adopted the western landscape as cosmos, the western indi vidualist as persona. In their most successful poems, objects exist visually and characters speak in recognizable voices through polished free verse. The trans parent style is more difficult to master than it seems, but Perreault and Cooper have mastered it. Reviews 267 Perreault’s touch, however, is far from consistent. The first section of Curved Like an Eye sets a promising pace with poems about alienated protag onists surprised by epiphanies. A thrown rock kills a tarantula. A man slaugh ters a chicken and watches a cat lick the axhead. These images of quotidian life sacramentalized evolve at the end of the first section into strong surreal lyrics. But the book loses its sense of direction in the second section with an astringent six-page display of learning in the obscurantist High Modern style, then with a bookish anatomy chart in the manner of Sir William Turner, fol lowed by imagistic fragments named after New Mexico towns. Even after we consult an atlas, most of the town poems remain orphaned halves of metaphors, completed only by the poet’s private associations. Why, for instance, does “he” in “Socorro” prefer “it fast / and with strangers”? Why should we care? When Perreault finds his audience again in “Los Ojos,” about desperate or loving characters in a desert community, the damage has been done. Strong later themes cannot suppress the sense that Curved Like an Eye is a collection of poems sharing little but authorship. The author is skilled and likable, and it is frustrating that somewhere in this 59 pages may be a fine 35-page book. So it is a relief to turn to Wyn Cooper, who has done his pruning. Extended by generous typesetting to 40 pages, the 24 poems in The Country of Here Below are a unified collection easy to read at one sitting, indeed difficult to put down. Cooper’s urgent monosyllabic lines take on mythic dimensions without compromising referential clarity, a style as naked and intense as his deserts and cities. Of “Opal, Wyoming,” for instance, he says: A...
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