Winter Count II by Frederick Manfred

Abstract

Reviews 257 Winter Count II. By Frederick Manfred. (Minneapolis: James D. Thueson, Publisher, 1987. 56 pages.) In the foreword to Winter Count II, Frederick Manfred explains that in “the winter time, when braves and chiefs didn’t have much to do,” they would “get out their winter count calendar (a scraped buffalo hide) and . . . paint on the hide a pictograph of the most important event of the past year.” Manfred was struck by the idea, resulting in Winter Count I (1966) and now in Winter Count II, “some little throws of light for each year from 1964 through 1985,” plus a few poems from earlier years. I enjoyed reading Manfred’s first book of poems, and the second volume is, I think, even better. As a reader, that was enough. As a reviewer, I had to ask why. A few of the early ones are rhymed. One, “A Heavy Year,” has a compli­ cated rhyme scheme. Some of them read like lovely prose, prose so trimmed and packed it works as poetry, call it what you will. “Lily Susan,” a 391-line poem about Manfred in Paris, is a good example. And there are recurrent themes: death and the desire to live forever; a sense of time in which past, present, and future are stage-center at the same moment; Manfred’s well-known love of nature; and his moving, beautiful, and often comically self-deprecating dreams of pretty young women. But none of these standard approaches answered my question. Prosody and themes do not a poem make. So I read again and suddenly realized there was something medieval about Manfred’s poetry. I don’t mean dated or in any sense old-fashioned, but Manfred is a Frisian child of Chaucer’s 14th century, and yet he is also very much at home in 20th-century Siouxland, a reincarna­ tion who makes a boon companion for his neighbors in Luverne, Minnesota. This realization did not constitute an answer. Critics pursue questions but end by saying, “Let’s read the poem again.” Recognizing something about the nature of Manfred’s hitting power, however, can be helpful. For Manfred, the earth and everything on it is alive, a rock and a plum tree as much so as the prettiest woman you ever saw. Our modern split between realism and romanticism does not apply. For the contemporary medievalist, both are part of the world, just as dreams and scientific facts—some of them, not all of them—and the often harsh facts of everyday life are all things that happen. Manfred is in complicity with this variety, and in Winter Count II he makes us feel a little bit more at home in a world which accommodates, without prejudice, both an irresistible fascination and the inevitable disappointment, both the cruel and the sublime. MAX WESTBROOK The University of Texas at Austin ...