Fatal Pleasure by Sam Hamill, and: Stone Roses: Poems from Transylvania by Keith Wilson

Abstract

Reviews 169 Sexton and Berryman to minor scribblers content with glib witticisms and hasty images. No complaint has arisen, either, from literary critics who inhabit the same writer’s workshops; they tend to flatter their friends. Poets should look to the land, to history and to the work of previous masters. Bringing these influences into poetry will encourage more meaning and more truth. Haines urges writers to get close to “the hard irreducible world of natural things” he experienced in twenty-two years of homesteading in central Alaska. There, he realized the inescapable importance of seasons, cycles, food and light. Poets should aim higher and shoot harder. “What we want in a poem is not some half-baked comment that any momentarily inspired ass might make, but a piece of work—let’s call it art—which embodies in a memorable way, through its sound, the images it represents, its rhythmical solidity and intensity, a part of our lives, recognizable and hidden.” As Haines suggests, poetry and place must be joined, but not superficially. What we need is more than the typically jejune musings of a grad student rusticating in a farmhouse all too close to Iowa City or Missoula. DAVE ENGEL Rudolph, Wisconsin Fatal Pleasure. By Sam Hamill. (Portland, Oregon: Breitenbush Publica­ tions, 1984. 75 pages, $14.95 cloth, $8.95 paper.) Stone Roses: Poems from Transylvania. By Keith Wilson. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1983. 94 pages, $12.95.) These are two very different, indeed almostopposite, collections of poetry. And yet they share a thematic matter. For both of them are attempts at recovering and understanding the past—although in one it is the personal past, in the other the past of a culture. Sam Hamill’smeditations on his past and his being are not “confessional” poetry. The personal is there, intense and painful, but in this poetry the reader is not asked to be father confessor and psychiatrist but, rather, participant. We can feel with the poet, since his language somehow conjures up our own pasts too (at least a western past). For the best of Hamill is a creation of landscape—and of people within that landscape. Hamill’s landscape has its past, but is not often the past of the people in it. He has some rather ritual references to the Far East, but those references seem imposed upon the real material of his feeling, human emotion and the dry rocks of Utah, the green trees and gray sea of the Northwest. The farthest Hamill looks back is when he lists, in a kind of joking catalog, the designers of type faces. The evocation here is in the gift of language. The jacket blurb quotes Denise Levertov’s praise of “Requiem,” and one must agree. This poem is 170 Western American Literature one of the finest things that Hamill has done. “Now that the nets are gone, the brass fittings stripped from the/wheelhouse, cobwebbed and dark, now that the anchor/is dragged away?” That question mark, and that fragment, are the very signs of this poem; what is the past, what is the meaning? But how concretely, strangely, asked. Not all the poetry here comes up to the level of “Requiem,” of course. Hamill can strain: “funky Fred Goudy” or “I take away their faces carved/ into my mind with razor blades.” Nevertheless in much of this poetry of his middle years he has made something very beautiful. Wilson’s poetry also creates a landscape and human beings; but the land­ scape is heavy with the sadness of human history. Wilson has attempted a difficult thing here. Almost all these short poems are about Romania (where Wilson had a Fulbright). And, although Wilson usually speaks in his “own” voice, many of the poems are attempts at creating a persona who is out of that Romanian past; some are “translations” from headstones; some stories about “historical” figures. One can praise a poet for trying to feel himself into another person’s existence, especially someone utterly foreign. But these other voices or recrea­ tions of past people don’t always succeed;the poetry becomes a bit “academic,” in that it seems willed and not fully realized...