The discipline of crevices: poems of Yosemite by June Dwyer

Abstract

Reviews 55 writers of “formulary” Westerns, are particularly useful. One wonders, how­ ever, why such writers as Wright Morris and Edgar Watson Howe were omitted while much less notable authors are discussed. Most entries close with a mention of one or two notable secondary works on the author or topic discussed, although none are suggested for such authors as McMurtry, Fred­ erick Manfred, Conrad Richter, John Steinbeck, or Owen Wister. The editors’ emphases are also intriguing: Zane Grey is given 12 pages; Frederick Faust (Max Brand), Ernest Haycox, and Clarence Mulford, 5-6 pages; and Frederick Glidden (Luke Short) and Wister more than 4 pages. But Cather is limited to 2/2 pages, Steinbeck to 2, and Wallace Stegner to less than 2. Also included in the volume are brief discussions of five pertinent topics. The material presented on “House Names” and “Pulp and Slick Western Stories” is very useful, much more so than accounts on “Historical Personali­ ties,” “Native Americans,” and “W'omen on the Frontier.” Still, all these topical entries will be of use to general readers, if less so for specialists in the history and literature of the West. While a few errors crop up here and there, this volume contains far fewer mistakes than most fact-filled volumes like this. All in all, this encyclopedia is a handy sourcebook for biographical and bibliographical information about nearly all major western writers of fiction. While it isless evaluative and analytical than some recent reference works, it is especially thorough on listings of notable western fiction and provides more information on western films than is found in any other bibliographical work on western fiction. All specialists in western literature should have this volume in their collection. RICHARD W. ETULAIN University ofNew Mexico the discipline of crevices: poems of Yosemite. By June Dwyer. (Yosemite National Park, CA: Yosemite Natural History Association, 1982. 64 pages, $3.95.) June Dwyer, her introducer claims, has broken through : “Virtually all of Yosemite’spoetry . .. has been overinflated and dull — until June Dwyer’s.” I wish I could whole-heartedly agree. June Dwyer writes in several very different styles, as if groping for the one that will be her own. Some work much better than others. Her best stance, for my money, is a wryness, a sprightliness, that reminds of Dickinson. In the poem “Red,” for instance, she puzzles over the way a flower, picked, has lost its brilliance : It can’t have been the red sowhat’sabout a color to— well, in effect, electrify? It had to be some current in the dye... . 56 Western American Literature Dwyer is frequently strong when she turns to the darker aspects of the natural scene. “I’ve watched the cougar stalk / He steps prepared,” she says in “California Poppy.” Climbing a peak, she remarks: “So near the heavens may be hell for you.” One piece contains a sort of invocation: “For all animals caught by the throat mid-day in mid-trail.” As is sometimes the case in this rhyme-wary era, the attempt to use fixed forms brings this poet some of her best lines: the constraints of rhyme and meter forcing the mind to look beyond the obvious, conventional wording. The most nearly satisfying whole poem in the book, I think, is the last in the sonnet-sequence “Summer.” The poem “Night” begins It is the hour when dark may bring to light A reappraisal of familiar things: and ends with the resonant couplet And be the silver surface as it may The savage may decide to have its way. This is valuable work. The bad news is that these insights, these little jolts of well-worked language, are swamped by a much larger mass of unprofitable material. June Dwyer the competent poet is crowded out by Dwyer the sentimentalist on the one hand and Dwyer the chaotic on the other. She is lavish with personifi­ cation ;every once in a while she gets away with it. I rather liked, for instance, her address to El Capitan: “How shall old rivalry . . . resolve / while You stand forwarding that massive claim?” But mostly we get the failed personifi­ cation that Ruskin labeled the Pathetic Fallacy. Dwyer’s claim...