Echoes Inside the Labyrinth by Thomas McGrath
1985; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1985.0085
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
Resumo174 Western American Literature colorist, a describer of purely regional settings. The poems in this book are made universal by an unabashed commitment to love. Even those pieces marked by loss or heartbreak or death are, in the end, life-affirming and eloquent. Zarzyski means for us to see that life, for all its horrors and frustra tions, is a joyful endeavor. The first of The Make-up of Ice’stwo sections is surely the most western. The opening poem, “All This Way for the Short Ride,” begins with a . . . grand entry cavalcade of flags, Star-Spangled Banner, stagecoach figure 8’s in a jangle of singletrees, after trick riders sequined in tights, clowns in loud getups, queens sashed pink or chartreuse . . . It’sa rodeo scene, brought suddenly dark and silent by a “prayer for a cowboy crushed by a ton / of crossbred Brahma.” One senses disaster here, disaster for the book itself, for out of context the scene seems merely maudlin. But not to worry. Zarzyski redeems and excels by giving the poem a persona, a bronc rider in the dark chute with the horse he will soon climb aboard. In a sense, the poem ispure elegy, and explanation — a justification, even — for what on the face of it is just another one of those sad and ludicrous deaths. Rodeo is life itself, invigorating when it isso thoroughly lived,so completely a challenge to death. In a very real way, we are meant to see that, for Zarzyski, life with out this tension is no life at all. The poems in the second section, though less consciouslywestern, remain committed to a life livedwith intensity and feeling. These are poems that sing. They are filled with virtuoso music, dazzling lines so adroitly orchestrated with assonance and alliteration, that they are a joy to read aloud. From the second stanza of “Say Huckleberry, but Keep Your Lucky Star Secret” : But ah, the magic, the magic of double-aught buck, loaded huckleberry bushes hanging like galactic mobiles steep into your secret patch. There ismore magic, magic in almost every poem. ROBERT WRIGLEY Lewis-Clark State College Echoes Inside the Labyrinth. By Thomas McGrath. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1983. 146 pages, $10.00 paper, $20.00 cloth.) Thomas McGrath’spolitics,he toldContemporaryAuthors, was “‘unaffil iated far left.’” And Contemporary Authors noted “Some critics believe that [his] leftist political views have kept him from the recognition his work Reviews 175 warrants.” So we may look for McGrath to be continually reaching out and touching someone — the worker, some representative of “the people,” one of his very own people. Contrariwise, he should then be rejecting the Right, the privileged, the In-person. McGrath, though, is a particularly inventive writer, adapting and con triving in all sorts of ways, to get his messages across. Some examples: The ballad form, as in “Any Day of the Week: A Sunday Text” — “Where Bourgeois Right lays ambushes / With pigging string and hooleyann, / He catches those already caught. / My lasso’sfor a wilder man — .” The rhymed homily, such as “The Homilies of Bedrock Jones” — “Though all the navies of the world / Could float in proletarian sweat, / The capitalist magician can / Walk round the Horn and not get wet.” The matin: “The Histories of Morning” — “Somewhere — in the kitchen — the coffee is chuckling like Pandar. / Somewhere the factories shake in the fists of the workers.” The chorus: “Chorus from a Play (2)” — “The worker, ripped from his dream of birth by the factory whistle / Slouches into the subway, is hurled under ground /T o the smithies of bondage, there to coin from his blood / What the Masters tell him is the common good.” McGrath’s attempts to make contact with his own are particularly poig nant—not in the enumerations of “Totems” (where he vignettes fellow-poets such as Bly, Wright, Merwin, Ignatow), not in the scattered pieces dedicated to obscure fighters for some shadowy Revolution, but in the two parts of his “Chorus for Neruda.” Though only the second part is “for” his wife Eugenia, the tribute to Pablo Neruda the Chilean poet-diplomat (a communist, he died mysteriously right after President Salvador Allende was killed) is really...
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