BOOK REVIEW S 2 6 5 This is clearly no place to come looking for heaven, but an earthier kind of transcendence may occur when one is humbled by the deadly indifference of natural forces: Wet boots, summits drowned in roaring cloud. In excelsis Deo. Cold enough to kill up here. (3) Rawlins’s mountain poems present an American sublime much fiercer than the testy stepmother that chased Thoreau from the false summit of Ktaadn. Perhaps so severe a depiction of wilderness may help restore to it some of the power it seems to have lost in translation to Sierra Club calendars and the Discovery Channel. And yet Rawlins’s intimacy with the wild also inspires surprisingly tender lyrics. In “Drinking in the Space” he observes how . . . wind kicked willow leaves, bruise-brown, across the sand to nest in shadow under sage, a pillow for the cold. (15) At times his landscapes recall the work of those Chinese mountain poets he so admires, who let emotion unfurl from a frugal grace of imagery. Poems like “Drifting in Montana” and “An American Chinese”—a wryly Western revi sion of the death of Li Po—acknowledge his debt to the Asian tradition of nature poetry. At the same time, his reply to Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow man” and a double sestina, “Solvay Trona Mine, June 30, 1994,” demonstrate Rawlins’s familiarity with his own cultural lineage. Still, it is the distinctive geographical and cultural presence of the American West that ultimately shapes his poetry. Even when Rawlins steps onto the turf of cowboy poets— those lonely line shacks and smoky bars—his diction and imagery are too original and genuine to slip into caricatures. This is no small feat. But in the end, the greatest contribution of In Gravity National Park to our culture’s nature poetry is its portrayal of the West as a site where natural forces—raw, merci less, and beautiful—retain power enough to humble and lead us to wonder. Dramas of Solitude: Narratives of Retreat in American Nature Writing. By Randall Roorda. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. 283 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Cheryll Glotfelty University of Nevada, Reno Narrative theory, meet nature writing. Huh? Nature writing would seem to be a most unlikely pond for narrativists to go a-fishing in. Where is the story? Where is the conflict? Where are the characters? In Dramas of 2 6 6 W A L 3 4 ( 2 ) SUMMER 1 9 9 9 Solitude, Randall Roorda argues that one salient story line in American nature writing is a narrative of retreat in which the first-person narrator withdraws from the human, artifactual world to confront the nonhuman, natural world. What happens there? Drawing from Geoffrey Harpham’s the ories of autobiography, Roorda finds a parallel action in nature writing’s retreat narratives: the narrator has a transformative experience (conversion one), which he or she then transcribes into writing (conversion two). Take E. M. Forster’s classic formulation, “The king died, then the queen died— of grief.” Until those last two words, there was no story, only chronol ogy. The addition “of grief’ adds meaning, creating narrative. Roorda locates an analogous story in nature writer John Muir, who wrote, “I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, 1 found, was really going in.” Recalling Forster, Roorda parses Muir’s state ment into the following paradigm for narratives of retreat in American nature writing: “I went out, then I stayed out— because I found out” (24). Roorda’s preliminary, theoretical chapter on genre borrows Stanley Cavell’s notion that a genre is not a form characterized by features, but, rather, an inheritance of certain conditions. In the case of narratives of retreat, Roorda identifies the essential condition that other humans are either absent or incidental. Three core chapters then examine, respectively, Henry Thoreau’s “Ktaadn” from The Maine Woods, John C. Van Dyke’s “The Approach” from The Desert, and Wendell Berry’s “An Entrance to the Woods” from The Unforeseen Wilderness, each of which manifest the retreat paradigm and, at the same time, challenge it in...