The Old One and the Wind by Clarice Short

Abstract

Reviews 145 who come each night to fill constricted eating houses which, Crouch notes, look like “upper class English restaurants, Polynesian tiki huts, or hangouts of seedy Chicago hoods.” In an Afterword, Crouch points out that his is a book about Steinbeck Country, not a book about John Steinbeck. And his superb photographs which depict the land in all its many forms sustain his statement. But the volume is marred by some weak prose which almost seems written in slavish imitation of Steinbeck himself. Much of it is hackneyed, worn, and marked by cliches and tortured alliteration. Still, the book is an excellent one — not just bland coffee-table fare, but a vital, living record of a land and its people that should interest not only the Steinbeck enthusiast, but anyone who has ever been struck by the serene beauty of California’s golden valleys and by the mystique of its spectacular coastline. RICHARD ASTRO, Oregon State University The Old One and the Wind. By Clarice Short. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1973. 46 pages, $6.00.) Admittedly, I am a product of that hard-nosed, post-puritan-butnonetheless -puritan stock that thinks paying $6.00 for 46 pages of poetry — anybody’s poetry — is downright immoral. Although this first volume of poetess Clarice Short’s is handsomely bound and jacketed, it is overpriced. But if one — as one must — looks beyond money, Miss Short’s poems cer­ tainly are well worth reading. Published widely in the likes of Poetry Northwest, Western Humanities Review, and Western Review, Miss Short is very good at imaginatively combining past and present — largely the past and present of the West — although one section of the book is devoted to poems concerned with museums and marble statues. A number of the poems in this volume, such as “The Whetstone,” and “Fall Hunger” remind one startlingly (at first glance at least) of Robert Frost: meter, tone, the soft flowing vernacular voice: all are alarmingly (or pleasantly?) there. And when one reads in “Take thou a great roll, and write on it with a man’s pen,” that the poet would write of might and force, of vibrant sinewy elk in sinewy air “But sink[s] — invariably fallfs]— to smallness,” — small things, like gnats and asters swallows and beaver ponds, one is again forcefully reminded of Frost. But these poems are not small, even though they, at times, deal with small things. In a poem: “Then and Now,” the poet, whisperingly speaking of a dilapidated farm yard, says “. . . the ground was yeastv with worms." 146 Western American Literature and then continues speaking of life on the “old place” compared with life after the trees have been pruned and the fields plowed. The poem sings of conflict: conflict between the teeming wonder of life under the “old system,” of the abundance of life in the disarray of dilapidation, and the neatness and trimness of progress and its effect on life. And it seems that natural selection is a kinder master than its bastard child, progress. And again, this poem effectively, almost hauntingly, binds the two worlds of then and now. Of particular interest to Western readers might be the poem “Im­ perfect Sympathies,” which speaks of Kit Carson’s headstone being chipped and fluted by souvenir hunters; and then moves on to deal with the moun­ tain mentality, of irony, of what was important then, and what is important now— of a life that has ceased to exist, of that life in the face of this life. Possibly the most appealing quality of Miss Short’s poetry is the visual— stark and real — imagery it portrays. In her poem “Winterkill,” we read: The winterkill Can hurt the heart too deeply for the spring To heal or cheer. There is no solace in the greening hill Where thin blades of the dogtooth violets stab Through the white rib cage of the deer. The image here, so strong, so (almost) purely sensory, so stark, has a sort of Desert Solitaire power, and certainly is worthy of Abbey himself. And the short piece speaks well of the West that Miss Short seems to know so thoroughly. In this poem...