While Dancing Feet Shatter the Earth by Keith Wilson

Abstract

76 Western American Literature has willfully absented himself from the scene.” Lawrence is generally re­ garded as a Hemingway hero and I do not believe his character is better clarified by being linked to Jacob or the Fisher King. Such identifications tend to reduce Wright Morris’ very human characters to abstractions. His characters for me at least, show more clearly that he has great insight into human nature than that he has read Henri Bergson as is claimed fre­ quently) . The most satisfying part of the book is the final chapter in which Miss Crump writes that Morris is “the man in the middle,” between realistic writers on the one hand and a group she calls fabulators (writers such as Nabokov or John Barth). In this chapter she comes to one of the great­ nesses of Mr. Morris’ writing, his ability to invent a plot that begins with an invitation to a funeral and proceeds, a book length later, to the death itself (Cause for Wonder). Any work about Mr. Morris is important, but I wish that Miss Crump had saved some of her insight for some critical articles instead of placing all in one book. MARY WASHINGTON, Utah State University While Dancing Feet Shatter the Earth. By Keith Wilson. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1978. 68 pages, $6.95.) It is easy to forget, in this post-Gutenberg age, that there are other ways of experiencing poems beside silently reading them in isolation, that sometimes poets choose these other rhetorical modes, and that such a choice may fundamentally influence the basic structures of the poems. Keith Wilson’s recent volume of poetry, While Dancing Feet Shatter the Earth, serves again to remind us of this reality. The predominant mode of performance for these poems is what I would call the “talking” or “tale-telling” mode. That is, the basic energies are derived from the narrative and ballad traditions rather than from the lyrical or meditative. Consequently, the diction is primarily conversational (utilizing Spanish phrasings), the descriptions are used to frame the narra­ tives rather than to provide the essential poetic resonance, and the verse forms rely much more on speech phrasings and accent than they do on tra­ ditional meters and line patterns: First he and his wife lived here with their Spanish daughter Reviews 77 and stunted Indian-Spanish son-in-law. . . . from Hill Man Alejandro, maker of leather stood only as tall as his ancient bench . . . from The Brujo of Santos: A Folktale The first time I saw him, he rose out of the grass of a hill, his eyes straight into mine, big head low . . . from Wolf Triptych Wilson’s choice of this rhetorical mode is, I am happy to say, intelli­ gently suited to the basic conceptual framework of the collection: the attempt to create “legend” out of man’s struggle to survive in the great Southwest, that land of power and beauty and mystery. In such a place, man, too, can only reach significance if he is trans­ formed into the mythic and the legendary, by reason of his courage, his resourcefulness, and, most of all, his capacity to endure. And so, Wilson presents old cowboys, leather-workers, outlaws, his parents, and Spanish women on their way to church as figures of power and mystery. The limitations imposed by such materials and methods are evident in those poems where the attempt to transform the commonplace to legend fails (Climbing in the Organ Mountains), where the focus moves from the specific to the generalized (The New Mexican), and where the primary mode seems to be the lyrical (Vision). Overwhelmingly, however, the material and methods combine so well that if we read the poems out loud, imagining ourselves drawn close about a campfire high in the mountains, we will experience again the imaginative power of a story well-told. One final word: the volume itself is printed and arranged with the same quiet concern for craftsmanship as are the poems. ALAN STEINBERG, Idaho State University Riders to Cibola. By Norman Zollinger. (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mex­ ico Press, 1977. 258 pages, $10.95.) Set in southern New Mexico, Riders to Cibola follows three genera­ tions...