268 Western American Literature The Exact Place. By Mary Ann Waters. (Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1987. 62 pages, $14.95/$7.95.) To read Mary Ann Waters’s The Exact Place, her excellent first book of poems, is to be made aware over and over of a vastness of place and distance, and at the same time to be brought down to and surprised by the particulars of her landscape. Further, one is always aware of the close relationship of family, friends, strangers, to the landscape. Wallace Stevens writes, “The way through the world is more difficult than the way around it.” Waters never lets us forget that. But if there is a solid sense of place, there is also frequently a sense of dislo cation. In the poem “Luck” : “Now there is no house, mother, / or if there is we can’t find it.” And in the poem “Moving,” an old aunt is being driven to a nursing home, and she whispers, “. . . scrub for miles, and blue sky forever.” In “Fire Mountain,” a poem about St. Helens after the eruption, Waters writes, “We were in the danger zone near Spirit Lake.” There are other danger zones in this fine book. In “The Narrows,” the speaker and her father almost drown when their boat capsizes. In “Life Story,” a woman performs a mastectomy on herself. People erupt in love, in quarrels, in night terror, in joyous travel, sometimes in revolt against what they are or what has happened to them: the barely contained sexual violence of the repressed woman in “Home Cooking” comes to mind. And sometimes there is simply a miraculous connection. In “Four Women Sitting in the Mineral Mud,” Waters writes, “. . . four women consenting / to the ease, the essence of mud.” What binds these poems is a great clarity of seeing, an understanding, a generosity and warmth of spirit, an unrelenting and painful sense of what is there, as when in “Something for Nothing,” the river drops and “speaks plainly” to us. Waters magically lowers the surface of her past and we are the richer for it. HARRY IIUMES Breinigsville, Pennsylvania Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing. Edited by Birk Sproxton. (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1986. 328 pages, $12.95.) In his preface to Trace, Sproxton asserts that what he is seeking to do here is “bring into one volume essays essential for an understanding of what has happened in the last twenty years in prairie writing . . .” (ix). Thus Trace begins with familiar pieces by equally familiar figures: the ubiquitous (and necessary) essay by Henry Kreisel, “The Prairie: A State of Mind,” is fol lowed by statements by Dorothy Livesay, Eli Mandel, Margaret Laurence, and Rudy Wiebe, among others. These writers, Sproxton says, “have helped us read and write the prairie west” (ix). Indeed they have. The second part of the book, which offers pieces commissioned for Trace, covers a wide range of Reviews 269 figures now writing out of the Canadian prairies. These take up fully twothirds of the volume and, despite an occasional tone of clubby self-consciousness coupled with displays of erudition (or non-erudition), offer a fascinating glimpse of what these writers are trying to do. The list includes the wellestablished (George Amabile, Douglas Barbour, Ken Mitchell, W. D. Valgardson ), the emerged or emerging (by far the largest groups, among them Pamela Banting, Sandra Birdsell, Lorna Crozier, Kristjana Gunnars, Aretha van Herk, David Williams), plus a couple whose presence could bear some explaining. A third section provides a biographical piece on each author plus some sug gestions from each on “further reading.” Taken together, the essays prove that Sproxton accomplishes in Trace just what he intends: the essays in the first section point up the beginning and influ ences of prairie writing prior to the ’60s and early-’70s while, in the larger second section, the breadth of thought, influence, cross-fertilization and, finally, vibrant activity are amply demonstrated. For neophyte or expert alike, Trace is an excellent book. ROBERT THACKER St. Lawrence University Hemingway, A Psychological Portrait. By Richard E. Hardy and John G. Cull. (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1988. 93 pages, $18.95.) This brief book is an attempt to treat the life of...