Any Single Loss by Marine Robert Warden, and: The Signature of the Spiral by Daniel Wells Schreck

Abstract

Reviews 77 1977, will be fascinated by this documentary. As part of that convention a special bus trip was arranged for members to visit the various Siouxland sites associated with Relvaag. There were three buses jammed full and despite occasional rain we visited his first home where he lived right after his marriage; then had a look at a sod house made by the son of an old pioneer, and examined a straw barn (straw piled on top of a wooden frame in which horses and cows and pigs could survive the bitter winters), and looked over the primitive farm machinery (prairie-breaking plow, walking cultivator, hay rake, etc.). The lady scholars on that trip were particularly interested in the interior of the sod house, examining the one-legged bed (the other three corners of the bed were lodged in the sod walls), the small black stove, wooden churn, small mirror, shelves, etc. You’ll see it all again in this brilliant half-hour movie, except that this time you will hear the words of Relvaag himself talking about these things from his letters as read by Erik Bye. But there is much more. You see scenes of Norway relevant to his early life there; the homes and the wild seas and the fishing boats. You hear his only surviving son Karl and his only daughter tell stories about their father. You hear succinct commentary byDr. Einar Haugen, the great Rolvaag scholar and professor of literature at Harvard, in which he summarizes the impact on American westering of the best-selling novel Giants in the Earth. Most interesting of all to this reviewer was the brilliant juxtaposing of the wind-stirred waves of the North Sea with the wind-stirred waves of wild prairie grass. And then out of that interposing you hear Rolvaag remark that an emigrant finally had to have two fatherlands to survive in his/her new country. It is stunning to see how much lively information has been packed into just a half-hour. It is a must film for all those who teach Rolvaag in American Literature. FREDERICK MANFRED Roundwind, Luverne, Minnesota Any Single Loss. By Marine Robert Warden. (Big Timber, Montana: Seven Buffaloes Press, 1989. 40 pages, $5.00.) The Signature of the Spiral. By Daniel Wells Schreck. (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1989. 60 pages, $6.95.) Reading is an act of recreation, a verbal bigbang that becomes the second time a galaxy of ideas form in the world of consciousness. For many people, poetry is the art that comes closest to letting the reader witness creation. In the beginning was the word in its rarest form. But too often when reading the words of the well-known poet whose books come out of New York, the visual images of her or him get in the way of the real seeing of literature, although that isnot supposed to happen in good work. 78 Western American Literature It is not that the reader truly knows Robert Bly or Sharon Olds, but their faces are there on the page, waiting to get between the words and the new constella­ tion. Writers who light the paths we travel through the dark, like Stafford or Kinnell, are people we see as well as hear. One of the joys of reading poetry from the small presses is witnessing a new creation, hearing a new voice, observing another map. And there are many new writers being published today; there are many good things happen­ ing in poetry. A conference in Milbridge, Maine, brings elementary students to hear some Maine poets. A cowboy poetry gathering in Roswell, New Mexico, brings out thousands of riders and ranchers to hear working cowboys read their poems and stories. Many of these recite their verses and songs, and most of them, if they are ever published, are published in works from small presses. Indeed, the small press is one sign of the vitality of poetry in America today. Both of these books, Any Single Loss and The Signature of the Spiral, come from small presses, the former from Seven Buffaloes Press in Big Timber, Montana, and the latter from Sunstone Press in Santa Fe, New...