Jerusalem of Grass by David Axelrod, and: The Year-God by Gerrye Payne

Abstract

164 'Western American Literature Louis, an enrolled Lovelock Paiute from Nevada, teaches English at Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota. Since 1984, he has lived “among the Dog Eaters”—the Sioux, that is—whose spiraling descent into cultural chaos has inspired these frank, gritty poems. The title of the third poem in the collection, “This Is No Movie of Noble Savages,” warns away the faint-hearted reader. At odds with “the fakery of Dances With Wolves," Louis records the “cigarettes, smashed flies, and dead steam”of a living room on the reservation, the “four offwhite walls” of a federally subsidized interior. He writes of a culture too trauma­ tized by the past to make sense of the present, much less to care about the future. Mostly he fears that there is no getting out of the trap. These poems have a documentary feel to them, a longing to be received as authentic. Louis’s documentary style leaves plenty of room for editorializing, though. At some point, he manages to rail against rednecks, white liberals, and Indians alike. The urge to incite some positive change boils inside him: “In Big Bat’s Conoco I wanted to scream:/Wake up, you damn people wake up!/ America does not owe you a living./America does not owe you your souls./ You’ve got to grab your balls/and fill them with fire/and stop whining/and drinking like bums. . . .’’ In the end, the impulse to shout himself hoarse is deflated by a bit of self-mockery: “. . . but all I did was m urder/an ant.” It is Louis’s compassion for human limitations, his own included, that keeps these poems from becoming shrill and hateful. His sense of humor helps, too, sarcastic though it may be. During a transcendent moment outside Sioux Nation Shopping Center, Louis accepts his own willingness to love, acknowledg­ ing the importance of that willingness in keeping him alive. Noticing the winos who “bask and bake/in the luxuriant miasma/of slow death,” he thinks to tell his anonymous “you”: “The only thing/separating me from them /is my growing need for you/and the fear that I might die unloved.” Among the DogEaters is highly recommended, but only for those capable of handling a strong dose of reservation reality. '¿AUL HADELLA Southern Oregon State College /Jerusalem of Grass. By David Axelrod. (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1992. 54 pages, $4.95.) /h e Year-God. By Gerrye Payne. (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1992. 54 pages, $4.95.) These two handsome volumes demonstrate that the beauty of the West is in the eye of the beholder. Depending on the eye’s focus, beauty may be internal or external, private or universal. Your lyrical temperament will condition your aesthetic response. Reviews 165 In “Experience,” Emerson observed: “It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man.” In all its halting prose, this insight could serve as an epigraph to Axelrod’s volume, since Jerusalem of Grass illustrates the thought’s validity for contemporary lyric poetry. The locales of Axelrod’s poems are fluid. Sketched in the barest of terms, they seek less to portray specific spots on earth than interchangeable places where things happen to the lyrical 1 /eye. Images of cold nature abound, but some cold cityscape is thrown in for good measure. Contact with the earth is tentative in Axelrod’s poems. They continue a tradition of provisional communion with nature that hearkens back to Frost’s “To Earth­ ward”: “Love at the lips was touch/As sweet as I could bear;/And once that seemed too m uch;/I lived on air.” The places where poetry happens are to Axelrod what Jerusalem is to devout Jews scattered in the diaspora: not the place itself but its symbolic extension in the mind is significant. Jerusalem is the beacon of orientation as well as the yardstick of ethical behavior that willjerk you back when melancholia threatens to get the better of you. Axelrod adopts a voice that finds it hard to live in harmony with itself. In contrast to the changing places, the poetic...