The Ripening Light: Selected Poems 1977–1987 by Lucile Adler

Abstract

Reviews 181 I liked less well, however, several of the more confessional poems which are placed in the last section. Perhaps their positioning near the end of the volume accounts for their almost jarring effect. For example, the poems “The Dark” and “Alcoholic,” to name two, seem less controlled, less resonant; they close up in ways few of the others seemed to do. The private sorrows are rendered too specifically. They seemed too private, somehow, placed here toward the end. Reading these poems was like entering what you thought was a now familiar house and suddenly finding you have opened the wrong door. In the poem “Low Tide Field Trip,” Hokanson describes what she finds in the tidepools: Found sugarstone. Found Quartz. Found garnets in a rock and wood petrified to stone. Found barnacles’ steep volcanoes, found limpets, found chitons and the fossil shells of clams. Found ourselves adrift in bright air, that quiet tide tugging, streaming home. Found too, is Alicia Hokanson’s M a pp in g the Distance. Reading this on a gloomy January afternoon, for I haven’t seen the sky in days, I am suddenly glad to be living in this rainy light. ANN PUTNAM University of Puget Sound T he R ipening Light: Selected Poems 1977-1987. By Lucile Adler. (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1989. 82 pages, $10.95.) One of the five sections of this volume of poems is titled “From the Loom of Juniper Woman,” who seems to be the creative voice of most of the poems in the entire volume. One is tempted to speak only of her because that voice is so carefully wrought; or one is tempted to focus merely on a close reading of the lyric beauty and vibrant sense images, but to do only that would be to break faith with the mature force of that voice: at dawn Juniper takes another’s sorrow in her hand a shard or splinter of red rock from arroyo bed or red dawn mountain to weigh against her own hard pain before the light is steady. Ripening is a theme throughout the volume, the sweet ripening of peaches and the ultimate brownish pulp in “A Dream of Peaches” where pregnancy 182 Western American Literature and war are inextricably linked in statement and in images equal in simple human power to those in Pound’s “River Merchant’s Wife.” The plight is stated in another way in a “letter” from “The Famous Old Man” who writes to young friends that “. . . the light is low; / houses slide downhill as usual in the West” and that “Oil and sanity leak / out everywhere. This is how it is. Fog too.” Loving remembrance is a major chord in these poems, as in “At Pilar for K.” where “Somewhere near here long ago / two lives held hands and spoke / of love.” But today “only the fragrance speaks.” A short poem titled “You” ends with this stanza: To have known one radiant kind of man is like owning a red tulip or an afternoon that lets the light through. Southwestern landscape is clearly the natural place for Juniper Woman to write of Cerro Gordo, fatal dawn, light, of being “exposed forever / on the red cliffs of the heart,” and of “the dream of the humble heart / Determined to dance . . . . ” The voice in the poems is of one who participates in the mythic reality of the sensory world. JAMES R. SAUCERMAN N orthw est Missouri State University T h e Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, vol. 2: 1928-1938. Edited by Tim Hunt. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. 610 pages, $60.00.) In Volume Two Tim Hunt continues his scrupulous editing, turning from those 1920s works in Volume One, which made Robinson Jeffers both famous and infamous, to what some would consider a middle period in the poet’s development. The volume also, in a sense, contains a swerve in Jeffers’s oeuvre, his sixteen poems of Ireland and England titled “Descent to the Dead,” which were written during his one trip abroad. By being arranged chronologically rather than along the lines of the original publication history—since poems planned for one volume were often carried...