322 WesternAmerican Literature Although they are thin volumes, each one has a simple, handsomely printed and colorful cover, a differently colored title page, and twelve pages of text on white paper. The fact that they are good looking is not insignificant since chapbooks from small presses are notoriously unattractive. Each book ends with a briefbiographical note, ahelpful appendix since most ofthe poems do invite biographical criticism and do create some curiosity about each writer. Penelope Reedy’s The Last Fairfield Rodeo has “Playing the Dusty Piano With The Windows Open”as the lastpoem. Itstone is ironic and centerson the loss ofidealism and expectations as they relate to relationships with males. Reedywrites, “the only man to breach the sagebrush”while she played well “asked if she knew/any real music.” Wright’s book, Crazy Horse and Walt Whitman’sHands, ends with her short poem “I Did Not Hear This in the Bible Belt,”which also focuses on diminishing expectations. Overfly referring to a swimsuit or a bible, the “one”of the last line (“Lord knows I never carry either one.”) may refer to many of those baggages that load us down in youth. Peter Wild's book, ExoticDancers, ends with my favorite poem in his collection. It is called “Urban Wildlife”and is written from the point ofview of owls, hawks, vultures or other winged predators that have adopted an urban territory. They come “just for the fun of it”pressing against the window of ascaredchild, “the most frightening big-screen television he’ll ever see.”What a nice poem about several subjects, including how children must deal with the loss of religious idealism that they first learn about in religious settings and then alter in the real-world environments they adopt as adults. Finally, William Studebaker’s book FallingFrom The Sky ends with ‘The Phantom Female,” a poem placed beside an autobiographical paragraph that uses the word “gender”three different times. The poem ends with the line “and find the mother in me again,”and suggests losses with the passing of time, an idea running through several of the poems in the book. Changing appearances and losing expectations are, of course, not the only themes to be found in this series of chapbooks, but it isobvious that the first four writers chosen for the series share ideas relating to how each perceives herself or himself with the passage of time. These are fine little publications from The Redneck Press. I look forward to seeing more tides in the series, and I anticipate reading more of the poetry of Reedy, Wright, Wild, and Studebaker. JIM HARRIS NetvMexicoJunior College Trace Elements from a Recurrent Kingdom: The First Five Books. By William Pitt Root. (Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1994, 277 pages, $25.00/$15.00.) “Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind,” wrote Samuel Johnson. William Pitt Root certainly possesses the curiosity of such a vigorous mind as he collects a lifetime of poetic observations from his previous highly Acclaimedvolumes and rearranges them thematicallyinto this beautifully printed edition Reviews 323 which becomes, like Leaves ofGrass, the book of his life, an organic collection of poems written over many years. Some well-known poems like “ The House You Look For,”first published in 1973, he has revised significantly; others like “Checking In,”first published in 1967, he has not revised since its original publication in Shenandoah. TraceElementsis a powerful poetic text by a significant western poet and one of the most important books byawestern poet in the lastfewyears. Unlike other western poets, however, Root is not so much curious about landscape as he is about character. Thus, along with his concern with poetic forms, he is reminiscent of eighteenth-century poets like Johnson. In poems like “Oldtimer,” for instance, he portrays a pipe-fitter in the Seattle shipyards for whom he had worked, and in “Do You Know the Country Around Here?”he portrays the pride of a Native American speaking of his heritage; “My people are like/deer/more than people./My mother’saunt told me/this/just after Iwas born.” The landscapes of Root’s poems, then, are populated landscapes inhabited by day-laborers and waitresses...