Poets West: Contemporary Poems from the Eleven Western States ed. Lawrence Spingarn, and New & Selected Poems by Peggy Pond Church

Abstract

Reviews 157 to the Presidency of the United States. Yet as a true son of the American frontier, he failed immeasurably to come up to what the guardians of European and American civilization thought a great man should be. To the faithful, this incongruity is only the more right, for God will confound human greatness and will utilize the weak and unseemly to fulfill his purposes. For others, however, this incongruity is the very seedbed of comedy. LEVI S. PETERSON, Weber State College Poets West: Contemporary Poems from the Eleven Western States. Ed. Lawrence Spingarn. (Van Nuys, California: Perivale Press. 1975. 162 pages, $5.50.) New & Selected Poems. By Peggy Pond Church. (Boise: Ahsahta Press. 1976. 75 pages, $2.00.) No reviewer ever wholeheartedly likes any poetry anthology. Antholo­ gies may be parochial, arbitrary in selection, academic, or may concentrate too much on the well-known. This last criticism certainly cannot be leveled at Poets West, for Lawrence Spingarn, its courageous editor, has chosen work from 120 very diverse western poets, and only a few (Philip Levine, Josephine Miles, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder and William Stafford, for instance) may be called household words of poetry. In this way, the anthology brings deserved exposure to poets who are not yet known beyond their home ground. However, as an inevitable consequence of this, the book is very uneven, the most notable lack being of much poetic vision more profound than imme­ diate experience. A prime example of this is the last poem in the book, “The 97th Kentucky Derby” by Geoff Young, which equates the running of a horse race with routine sexual intercourse in a manner which is demeaning to both. The conversational tone prevails in the majority of poems, and it is a legitimate poetic voice; but in reading through the book, one comes to miss a precision of imagery, depth of texture, and sureness of rhythm which distinguish poems from prose. Many poems, like Bernice Ames’s “Getting to Emily’s,” are essentially mini-stories, which leave the reader saying, “Yes, of course, but so what?” There are exceptions of course, and they are well worth the price of the book, like Richard Hugo’s “Mountain Ranch Abandoned,” which is essentially description; but Hugo’s perception and exceptional poetic craft have lifted the poem to a universal dimension. The same is true of Paul Dilsaver’s “Corwin Psychiatric Ward, 1972,” which makes simple but effec­ 158 Western American Literature tive use of the ambivalence of the color white as symbol, and evokes a very strong emotional response. There are other poems of this high quality in the book, and they make Poets West a valuable collection. Peggy Pond Church’s New & Selected Poems, beautifully printed by the Ahsahta Press, is also a valuable collection, spanning a sensitive, gifted, and highly serious poet’s work with selections from her first book, Foretaste, published in 1933, to 13 new poems. Church’s most pervasive metaphor is the western landscape, which she observes with perception and love, and in which she sees both ominous magic and clues to the understanding of human character. In “December,” a new poem, The sky is pale blue, the wind like an invisible herd with horns in velvet goes butting among the rough trees. and in “Omen,” taken from Ultimatum for Man (1946), she writes I have seen omens in the sky and in the entrails of wild beasts slaughtered; have felt the ground pulse without footfall; watched dead leaves driven by no wind. Church’s poetry is conventional in content and style, and most human in voice, both of which characteristics are refreshing in this age of wild experimentation. One of the best poems in the book, however, is a departure from Church’s usual style, and reads like a very powerful metaphor for the agony and delight of creativity. “Still Life” describes a woman playing with some colored stones: She cannot let them lie. She cannot see the stones as only stones. She says, “If these were birds and they could fly!” and suddenly the air is full of birds; The colors move and sing. Readers of Church’s poetry will be glad of her...