Reviews 269 ungraspable, a dust mote in the air, is suddenly an island with indigenous flora, beasts, and soil, in the vastness of the sea, or that ultimate foothold, mind itself. In this vein, Archipelago is lovely and serious, but never imposing. There’s none of the pretentious fuddle that passes (in the age of supply-side poetics) for the real stuff. Instead, Sze achieves his considerable artistic splendor by striving for the real. And in so doing he reveals a moral beauty which owes neither to cold logic, nor to blind faith, but to a compassionate and heart-rending accuracy. C. L. RAWLINS Boulder, Wyoming Earth Prime. By Bert Almon. (London, Ontario: Brick Books, 1994. 96 pages, $11.95.) Bert Almon is a well-traveled poet, physically and metaphysically speaking. The “settings” of the place-specific poems in Earth Prime are numerous: Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Montreal, Alberta, Staffordshire, New York City. The psy chic settings are as varied. In “King Oliver,” we enter the mind of a black man who could have been a great jazz musician, but who remained on the fringes of fame all his life. In “Love’s Synecdoche” we hear three separate but related sto ries of men who confuse love of parts with love of the whole woman. In “A Cousin, Once Removed,” we are introduced to a wounded soldier who survives a war, only to become the victim of random violence soon after returning home. Almon is a writer whose poetic sensibilities remain intact as he travels from place to place, from mindset to mindset. He never loses the ability to detect the irony in what he experiences. “The Sun Tan Parlour in Maui,” for instance, begins by defining sun tan worshippers as people who alchemically change/ the epidermis to mahogany/ en route to melanoma,” and ends by questioning the logic of running a tanning salon twenty yards from Lahaina beach in Hawaii: I suppose there’s a masochistic pleasure in lying in a steel coffin with glass tubes in the lid soaking up ultraviolet light that must be powered by coal sent via Newcastle to Maui. Almon seems perfectly suited to the phrase, “citizen of the world.” In any place he visits, he comes across a simple experience worthy of poetic savoring. In “Footnotes to Puasanias,” he watches a woman with a camera who stood 270 Western American Literature in the ruins of Apollo’s temple trying to put the Sacred Way into focus as the guard blew his whistle over and over to wave her off. In “Music in the Air,” he overhears one drunk say to another: “John isn’t that where you were sick last night?” “Yes and I was sick over there once and over there.” The most refreshing characteristic of this collection is that it does not, for the most part, partake of the modem poetic trend toward cynicism. Almon is a poet who delights in life, who writes poetry that sings its praises rather than bemoans its insufficiencies. CHARLOTTE M. WRIGHT University of North Texas Press May Out West: Poems of May Swenson. By May Swenson. Selected and arranged by R. R. Knudson. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996. 64 pages, $15.95.) Nature: Poems Old and New. By May Swenson. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. 240 pages, $17.95.) The latest two books released by the late Utah poet May Swenson remind us of the scope and the precision of her gift. They are treasures for the Swenson enthusiast as well as for the general reader. May Out West would be a starting place for readers new to Swenson’s work. A carefully selected and beautifully presented edition of thirty-four poems, it contains two previously unpublished: “The Seed of My Father” and “White Moon.” This book is not just for Westerners, though they will relish the portrait of our landscape it offers: it is for all who value their connection with the earth that sustains us. Reading through these poems, one is struck by the vastness of her poetic project, her deeply-felt and clearly expressed attachment with the world. She does not just admire nature, she becomes an integral part of it in a...
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Mar 1, 2001
Nicholas F Gier 
