The Illinois Suite by Marine Robert Warden, and: Confrontations by Max Westbrook

Abstract

Reviews 327 in the poem by Don Welch recalling playing kick the can with fat Fred Tooley and by Grett and Hulda searching through the seed catalog in “Old World Germans of SE Avenue C.” These isolated examples are not meant to represent the “best” from each poet, by any measure of the imagination, but to typify the poems of all four. The now treasured voices we may have met before, perhaps even inside our­ selves; and the treasure house we may find to be our own, or a neighbor’s down the street, or a farm shed in the glow of a yard light, somewhere. JAMES R. SAUCERMAN Northwest Missouri State University The Illinois Suite. By Marine Robert Warden. (Peoria, IL: Spoon River Poetry Press, 1983. 19 pages, paperback, $2.50.) Confrontations. By Max Westbrook. (Austin, TX: Thorp Springs Press, 1982. 25 pages.) While small press volumes keep us conversant with talented new poets of western America, we have learned to temper enthusiasm with caution. Prac­ titioners aren’t licensed. There are no guarantees that all who hang out shingles declaring themselves fit to converse poetically will have much to say or will say it well. That is as it should be. For if we remain alert and are willing to trudge through a few parched and withered acres of prosody, we are rewarded, occasionally, with the sounds of clear, honest voices. Spoon River Poetry Press has already repaid us amply with such fare as Alec Bond’s genuinely funny Frost spoof, North of Sioux Falls. We took up, then, Marine Robert Warden’s Illinois Suite with anticipation that this Cali­ fornia poet might be another fortuitous discovery. Instead, we found echoes of old-style Illinois imagism and tough-tender, nostalgic, at times vapidly sensual pressings from the author’s past. There is an obligatory poem to a grandparent. A sincere tribute, it tries hard to balance sentiment with what might be called passional continuity between generations. The narrator and his young bride return from woodland lovemaking, bringing a bouquet (ever so self-consciously) to Grandmother: “wild flowers/from around our bed/ pungent smells were part of our skins.” For her part, the grandmother gives them her blue Chinese vase, later discovered standing empty on their piano, for she has died and become “part of the earth” but ready to burst from her “tight green bud” again. Warden’s toughest, least tender poems are the citified ones. The intro­ ductory poem, for example, inventories Chicago during the spring of 1954, showing vital signs flagging. Wounded snow geese, blown off course, circle overhead, “coughing blood from the sky like tubercular men.” Under the circumstances, the narrator offers his keenest demonstration of good judg­ ment. He leaves for Denver. 328 Western American Literature It is time to light out for the Territory ourselves — to Austin, say, and Max Westbrook’s Confrontations. Recalling the author’s many scholarly services for the literature of the American West, most of us would resist labeling his talent new. But it is good nonetheless to hear a familiar voice of sense and sensibility striking more personal notes. It is no surprise that this voice is witty, sincere, unpretentious, frequently self-deprecating and teasing, but just as frequently urgent. What Westbrook confronts in his little book is the self in all its contraries, alternately beautiful, tawdry, violent, or sweet. He is particularly impressive when he beards bestial human nature (“the universal grizzly,” he calls it) in its lair, the poet quixotically armed in just his humor. It is sufficient. It won’t do you any good to hide. I know you’re there, smell your breath in mine, hear you dragging boxed feet at all hours almost see your beady eyes watching. Your protean talents notwithstanding one day at the office and you’d come unglued. So here we stand, a little abashed, with our universal grizzlies tamed by the switch of bureaucracy. This poet knows when not to embellish, when to reduce imagery to crisp honesty of voice. There are equally crisp, if darker notes elsewhere in the book as Westbrook invites us to confrontation: “Tell me I am not alone in this world.” He isn...