Red Tools by Stephanie Marlis

Abstract

Reviews 177 When they lend us themselves they use the word love. They would finish with us as with a piece of heavy equipment. Their motion’s a form of immunity. Loneliness gives them freedom to move. and in the next I wake with you, now, and for the first time that I can remember I envy nothing. The morning’s singular, it will not refer. Am I naive? Is this some child’sdrawing? There’s a blue brook. On it, a boat. One cloud. One bird... . Naive? Hardly. Holden looks honestly and deeply at his life, and in doing so forces his readers to look at their own lives in the same way. Not all will be happy with what they see in Holden or in themselves, but few who read this book carefully and sympathetically will come away from it unmoved. CHARLES GUILFORD Boise State University Red Tools. By Stephanie Marlis. (Story, Wyoming: Dooryard Press, 1984. 43 pages, $8.00.) Red Tools’ occasions are ones common to those of my generation: the walk home after taking in a foreign movie, a meditation in the urban garden, the recollection of a childhood spent this side of the European death camps, this side of Hiroshima. Stefanie Marlis’ themes are familiar to anyone, but perhaps because she belongs to a group coming to spiritual age unsure of itself, there is a central theme behind each poem’s ostensible subject — be it the line between possibility and being, the place of others’ lives in one’s own, or the loss of the beautiful in time. What Marlis is really after is vision, by which I mean a coherent and consistent approach to assimilating the world. The majority of these pieces expose some not-yet mature expression of that vision. Those poems that seem most aware of the insufficiency of their outlook seem the most successful. Those poems don’t forget there is a central urgency beyond the immediate conflict and resolution being recorded, and by main­ taining that awareness each poem uses its “flaw” to create in its own small way the slowly clarifying definition of what Marlis will show to be, toward the end of the book, an achieved way of feeling and understanding phenomena. 178 Western American Literature That vision requires, first of all, the acceptance of the unnatural, the painful, and the mysterious: We live in a circle, taste both wreckage and sweetness, and I exchange girlhood for bird ghosts and the vibrant fasciae of the world looped inside us. (“Birdsong, Dog’s Song”) It requires the embrace, though fearful, of those thousands of things that threaten to “draw you into their orbits.” It requires love of the pickpocket, the ruined garden. One must pass equally, without passing over, the suffering of the Asian cholera victim and the neighborhood husband and wife, victims of their domestic wars. While this approach to emotional and aesthetic equa­ nimity sometimes leads to a discouraging flatness in the music of the poems (as in the beginning of “In the Shape of Joy” and elsewhere), it leads also to the triumph of the last poem, “From Here,” where pain seems no stronger than happiness. I can let my scars work themselves into clarity. Into their leaving. It would be naive to expect that this “working into clarity” is continuous, and so a second book by Marlis might well be expected to treat further the refinement of personal vision. That occurrence might point additionally to what some may feel to be this maturing generation’s curse: that it sees and feels with a sense of self too fragile to remain long without need of some kind of repair. RICHARD ROBBINS Mankato State University The Peaceable Kingdom. By Peter Wild. (Rochester, NY: Adler, 1984. 64pages, $6.95.) The poetry of Peter Wild in The Peaceable Kingdom both puzzles and delights. It puzzles when meaning obscures; it delights when meaning sud­ denly dawns. Image builds upon image; odd connections which at first do not mesh suddenly fall into place. To Wild the animal kingdom is indeed peace­ able; that is, it is capable of being at peace though it is not peaceful yet. His concern for the...