308 Western American Literature The waters of the Texas coast around Port Aransas are hardly ever clear; they are almost invariably murky and have about them what Harrigan describes as “the rich, pungent smell of living things that have corroded in salt air.” But Aransas, while retaining a rich theme and showing more depth than anyone would expect of places like Laguna Madre or San Antonio Bay, has a startling narrative clarity to it. The novel reminds me of one rare day on a visit to Port Aransas when I looked over the rail of a ferry and saw the absolutely clear features of a sunken sailboat thirty feet below me. I never saw that kind of thing again, but I knew it was possible. Perhaps I also knew that it was possible for someone to write the way Stephen Harrigan does in his first novel. But I certainly didn’t expect it. WILLIAM BLOODWORTH East Carolina University Selected Poems. By Richard Hugo. (New York: Norton, 1979. 161 pages, $4.95.) “What endures,” Richard Hugo once said, “is what we have neglected,” and it is his own neglected past — those first three books long out of print — which most endures in his choices for Selected Poems. The reader who comes to Hugo for the first time, or who has searched for the early Hugo, will be greatly rewarded by this volume. The selections from A Run of Jacks (Minn., 1961), Death of the Kapowsin Tavern (Harcourt Brace, 1965), and Good Luck in Cracked Italian (World, 1969) all sing, each group giving a compete picture of each volume, showing off both the tech nical dazzle (which Frederick Garber calls Hugo’s “Northwest baroque”) and the haunting themes of loneliness and loss which inform his Northwest and Italian poems and indicate how terror and joy knit together to create the strongest western voice in contemporary American poetry. That voice gained its greatest clarity in The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (Norton, 1973), which dominates this book (represented by nine teen poems, more than from any other book) as. it has dominated Hugo’s career. The selections from the first four books make it possible to see the evolution of the Hugo town from darkly personal poems about Seattle (“Duwamish”) and the Northwest (“Port Townsend”) through Italy (“Spinazzola: Quella Cantina La”), before it seems to settle permanently in Montana (“Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg”). But something happened in Hugo’s “Lady” poems: the town grew to be more than a place in a region “out there,” and became an emblem for dispossession. That’s why I miss, among selections from “Lady,” “Cleggan,” a poem which shows the Hugo town can be in Ireland as much as Montana, tied as it is to any life lived in loss, “swimming way down aimless, most of it uncaught.” Reviews 309 If Hugo’s memory is clear, the closer he gets to the present, the less sure his sight. The selections from What Thou Lovest Well Remains American (Norton, 1975) and 31 Letters and 13 Dreams (Norton, 1977) distort each book. That tough-guy voice in “Philipsburg” — where does it go in “What Thou”? Apparently nowhere, since Hugo has left out of his selections tough-guy fantasies like “Cattails” and “Invasion North,” including instead harmless poems like “Old Scene” and “Landscapes” — good poems, but all too retrospective of his earlier romanticism. We have seen this love liness before. There’s simply much more to Hugo than Hugo selects. The secret of “What Thou” lies in that curious masculine honesty about child hood fears and adult anger that Hugo shows underlying the tough western voice of “Philipsburg.” And that voice is related to Hugo’s turn, in the Italian poems, from northwest romance to bleak realism — a realism that becomes particularly western American. That turn involved moving from the glories of romance to the necessities of social and personal connections to the past, to male fantasies, to the odd, the enraged, the neglected. But it seems that in Selected Poems Hugo prefers romance to realism, the order of balance to the disorder of experience: he says as much in his selections from 31 Letters and 13 Dreams. The...