Mapping the Distance by Alicia Hokanson

Abstract

180 Western American Literature R ecollection of fam ous figures of our culture makes up part of that com ­ m onplace life also. Poetic responses to Verm eer, to Robert Frost, to H em ing­ way, to W inslow H om er in the volum e help fulfill this facet of our shared experience. T h e strength of these poems lies in their portrayal of the hum an condi­ tion am id fam ily and reminiscences of fam ily, in present love and remembered continuing love. JA M ES R. SA U C E R M A N Northwest Missouri State University Mapping the Distance. By A licia Hokanson. (Portland, Oregon: Breitenbush Books, Inc., 1989. 56 pages, $8.95.) Mapping the Distance, A licia H okanson’s first book of poetry and 1988 w inner of the K ing County Commission Publication Prize, demonstrates clearly that Hokanson is a first-rate poet w ho bears close w atching. H er poetry has an elegance and delicacy secured by a sure presence of voice and control of line. T h e poem s tell of an accum ulation of sorrows w hich are redeemed finally by love. T he book “m aps” the “distances” from dark to light, winter to spring, death to life, in increasingly personal terms. U ltim ately, the central tension of the book becomes the fragile balance betw een light and dark. H okanson is a Northwest poet in the true sense and her poems are full of images anyone living in the N orthwest knows as old friends— lim pets and chitons and sea cucumbers and starfish; waves of kelp, the yellow-headed jaw fish, the mysterious, stately presence of herons, mist, fog, rain, and all things green. N o wonder this poet is in love w ith light! “Light is w hat’s im portant,” declares the poet, and she finds light, like a “Profusion of dreams [that] grows out of the dark.” Regardless of the leaden skies, the sun “finds the shadowed parts.” O f the heron she writes, “W hat light w e’re dealt / glints off their bluegrey bodies.” She tells of sea creatures who must “grow huge eyes to gather w hat light there is.” In a leap of im agination the poet merges w ith the sea creatures w ho seek out even the most tenuous filaments of light: In the blue tanks, the four-eyed fish divides its eye above and below the surface. Stars and starfish, comets, phosphorous, and beyond the glass our ow n lum inous flesh tangle in earth’s dark nets. Here and throughout the volum e, Hokanson m anages beautifully to make the leap toward significance w ithout losing the felt sense of the thing itself. A gain and again the universal emerges out of the specific; the fact flowers into m eaning w ithout strain. T here is no tentativeness here. Reviews 181 I liked less well, however, several of the more confessional poems which are placed in the last section. Perhaps their positioning near the end of the volume accounts for their almost jarring effect. For example, the poems “The Dark” and “Alcoholic,” to name two, seem less controlled, less resonant; they close up in ways few of the others seemed to do. The private sorrows are rendered too specifically. They seemed too private, somehow, placed here toward the end. Reading these poems was like entering what you thought was a now familiar house and suddenly finding you have opened the wrong door. In the poem “Low Tide Field Trip,” Hokanson describes what she finds in the tidepools: Found sugarstone. Found Quartz. Found garnets in a rock and wood petrified to stone. Found barnacles’ steep volcanoes, found limpets, found chitons and the fossil shells of clams. Found ourselves adrift in bright air, that quiet tide tugging, streaming home. Found too, is Alicia Hokanson’s M a pp in g the Distance. Reading this on a gloomy January afternoon, for I haven’t seen the sky in days, I am suddenly glad to be living in this rainy light. ANN PUTNAM University of Puget Sound T he R ipening Light: Selected Poems...