Love Medicine. New and Expanded Version by Louise Erdrich

Abstract

Reviews 379 Stafford’s poetry doesn’t always attract close textual criticism, and it is interest­ ing to consider the extent to which the critics see the poems as products of character and sensibility. Thomas Hardy comes to mind, though Hardy was a more self-conscious craftsman. It seems difficult to write an essay on Stafford without calling him “quiet,” a term that seems accurate enough in an impres­ sionistic way but doesn’t take us far into the art of the poems. They have their own rhetoric for all their naturalness. Two critics in this volume who are not sympathetic with Stafford’s poetics, Robert Creeley and Bob Perelman, have done us a service by noting that there is a rhetoric at work. If it is the height of art to conceal art, as Larochefoucauld said, then Stafford’s art is high indeed, Andrews has divided his book into three sections: book reviews, general studies, and studies of individual poems. The volume is rather heavy on book reviews. Some of these might have been sacrificed in order to reprint some of the longer articles on Stafford listed in the bibliography, like John Lauber’s “The World’s Guest—William Stafford” and George S. Lensing’s “William Stafford, Mythmaker.” Among the best of the longer articles is Jeff Gundy’s previously unpublished essay on Down in My Heart, Stafford’s account of his experiences as a conscientious objector. The essays on individual poems are generally very brief, though insights are common. Andrews has given us a good graph of Stafford’s reputation and a good collection of critical response to his work. BERT ALMON University ofAlberta Love Medicine. New and Expanded Version. By Louise Erdrich. (New York: Henry Holt, 1993. 367 pages, $22.95.) Because I loved the original version of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, I felt a bit apprehensive when I learned of this new edition. But the book is more expansion than revision, since Erdrich made only minor changes within exist­ ing chapters (for example, Beverly Lamartine acquires the nickname “Hat”) and then added five new sections: “The Island,” which rounds out Lulu Nanapush’s earlier life; an additional section in “The Beads," which shows Marie Kashpaw’s relationship with her mother-in-law; “Resurrection," which portrays the widowed Marie, stalwart as ever, dealing with the death of her oldest son; and “The Tomahawk Factory”and “Lyman’s Luck," which focus on the younger Kashpaws and Lamartines, nicely leading us into The Bingo Palace, Erdrich’s most recent addition to the series. These expansions undoubtedly strengthen the book. Besides clarifying some loose ends that arise in subsequent novels, the additions contribute to the organic feel of the series, since characters in Erdrich’sbooks become even more intertwined. Reading this new version of Love Medicinemade me feel as if I were 380 WesternAmerican Literature meeting with good friends again, only this time I knew these friends better, more completely. BETSYWARD Suwaiki, Poland American Iconology: New Approaches toNineteenth-Century Art and Literature. Edited by David C. Miller. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. 344 pages, $40.00.) “Iconology”as David C. Miller conceives it in editing this volume, is predi­ cated on the assumption that “the visual and the verbal are deeply implicated in each other.” Miller’s use of the word “implicate” may strike a familiar newhistorical note—iconology, as it is practiced in the various essays in this collec­ tion, exhibits in its different incarnations a distinct concern with unmasking the relationship between political power and symbolic production (especially the production of symbolic landscapes) during the rise of the modern American middle class. The volume’s essays endeavor to “do justice to the intricate associations among art and literature, the changing nature of subjectivity, and the develop­ ing cultural context” of nineteenth-century America. Eclectic as they are in their subject matter and theoretical perspectives, the essays generally succeed in doing just this. Some selections, such as Laura Rigal’s “Peale’s Mammoth” or David Bjelajac’s “The Boston Elite’sResistance to Washington Allston’sElijah in theDesert”explore the social implications of one particular visual artifact. Other essays, such as Kenneth John Myers’ “On the Cultural Construction...