Skookum: An Oregon Pioneer Family’s History and Lore by Shannon Applegate

Abstract

Reviews 85 Amplitude: New and Selected Poems. By Tess Gallagher. (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1987. 199 pages, $15.00.) A book such as Amplitude—one which combines old work with new—is both fish and fowl. Readers familiar with Tess Gallagher’s work will almost certainly find their earlier favorites here, poems which consistently reward readers’ attention. My own list would have to include “The Coats,” “Rhodo­ dendrons,” “Instructions to the Double,” “The Ritual of Memories,” “Under Stars,” “Woodcutting on Lost Mountain,” and “Reading Aloud,” to name but half a dozen plus one. Readers new to Gallagher’s work might consider these poems by way of introduction. From another perspective, a volume of new and selected poems provides an opportunity for early conclusions about a writer’s strengths, her develop­ ment, and her most current poetic aims. Tess Gallagher’searly poems show her as a poet of what one could loosely refer to as “the private life.” Her early work embodies and confronts central questions of individual selfhood and of one’s relationships inside the family. By speaking movingly and successfully about such private matters, Gallagher’s poems become a significant voice, a signifi­ cant force, in the interior lives of her readers. In Willingly (the volume prior to this one) and certainly here in the new work, Gallagher clearly wants to write a more public, overtly political kind of poem. The difficulties here are formidable, and Gallagher has not entirely overcome them. Alas, in poems like “That Kind of Thing,” the lines go alarm­ ingly slack. In fact, the verse paragraphs in that poem could easily be recast as prose. But there are a variety of fresh, witty, compassionate, wise, and meditative poems here too. They constitute (to borrow from the opening of “Bonfire”), “The inflections ofjoy. The inflections of/ suffering. And strangely / sometimes the mixing / of the two.” Tess Gallagher is one of those still-rare but everincreasing species: the indigenous northwestern writer whose achievements (and promise) prompt readers from every region to look in this direction and pay attention. LEX RUNCIMAN Oregon State University Skookum: An Oregon Pioneer Family’s History and Lore. By Shannon Apple­ gate. (New York: William Morrow, 1988. 460 pages, $22.95.) This is the most important book of Oregon family history since the novels of H. L. Davis, a book which gives the reader an accurate and passionate view of the real men, women, and children who settled Oregon. Like Davis, who was related to the Applegate family by marriage, Shannon Applegate demon­ 86 Western American Literature strates in Skookum that the Golden Male Pioneer sculpture on the capitol dome in Salem is an incomplete image of western settlement. Skookum achieves authenticity by making family history (1843-1980) available to outsiders in two ways. Applegate uses all the means of the mature historian: seventeen years of research, ten pages of annotated bibliography, numerous maps, historical photos, posters, and blueprints, quotations from unpublished letters, diaries, interviews, and journals. She also uses the pas­ sionate craft of the novelist: dramatic and narrative organization, changing points of view, foreshadowing, unified sensuous detail, characterization, the­ matic interest, and stylistic variation. Most early chapters use different thirdperson feminine point-of-view characters, but eventually the author emerges as a first person narrator. As she enters into a dialogue with the family women, she also begins to live in their house with their ghosts. Her prose is intimate and panoramic. During an interview with her great aunt Eva in November, 1980, Apple­ gate’s monologue shows how these combined passions for family, history, and literature bring her ancestors alive: My heart is beating; I feel it thrusting against the walls of my chest. I am inside this old woman, our senses merging. Beneath the marred transparency ofskin, beneath the veins, floating blue near the surface. Behind the eyes of watered green, nearly sightless, minute white islands of cataracts, pupils dilating from the Demerol, the pulse, our pulse, pulls, pushes the skin up and down, slender wrists, blood mov­ ing. Family blood. We are connected. I cannot understand it all, but I feel it moving through both of us.... Mine, something the same. Pulse distant. Floating down the river...