The Admirations by Lex Runciman

Abstract

Reviews 179 With names like Jeter, Miz Purdy, Mam, and Mayda, the characters are often displayed through colorful and pithy writing. In “Living,” Silas Brame has “cut more throats than a meat market butcher,” and we find him with “his eyes walled back and tobacco juice spilling over his cheek like worm’s blood.” In “Trip in a Summer Dress,” the young narrator resists letting her illegitimate son be raised as a brother: Finally 7 said—so loud my father ran off the road, “He’s not your child! I birthed him. I’m his mother, and I’m going to raise him up to know I am! Now what’s the matter with that?” My mother said, “Count the I’s, and you’ll know.” These stories also reveal a self-referential level. For example, in the subtly incestuous “Six White Horses,” the brother Hector “hectors” his sister and cuts down a pear tree (“pair” tree) when she begins dating at forty. In “Harvest,” Jess Earl and Mayda’s unaccomplished son is killed. The lack of success on their farm parallels the son’s and when Mayda says, “A pitiful few straggles is not a crop!” she is speaking of more than the soil beneath their feet. As always, such levels can deepen a work’s thematic resonances. In keeping with the general nature of the Southwest Life and Letters series, Sanford’s stories favor a revelation of territory through dialogue and detail peculiar to the region. D. L. WRIGHT University of Utah The Admirations. By Lex Runciman. (Amherst, Mass.: Lynx House Press, 1989. 72 pages, $8.50.) Although only one of the poems in this volume carries the title “Nostalgia,” many others could have been so titled. The poems are filled with homey images of family, furniture, linoleum, and barns—the images of ordinary middle-class domestic life, even in the West. And here is the point, the breakthrough from the more artificial limits of regionalism: precious little in the poems is distinctly western, yet they hold in particular example the universal experience of com­ monplace human existence in our houses and neighborhoods. The warm comfort of such experience pervades the poems even though it does not make them distinctly western. The poem “1492 Fremont” captures the outward signs of stressed inner tensions, longings, inescapable dreams characteristic of the poems in the volume when a “gray, spiteful woman” carefully washes her derelict Buick which she constantly sees from her kitchen window. In “City of Roses” we are in a “white and mechanical room” amid “relatives and a family of technical strangers,” awaiting a dying. From all of this life experience what'can be salvaged? What can be used by those who endure, the “Walkers” who “walk for the time it takes, / for whatever they see”? 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...