276 Western American Literature prompts or improvisations than complete poems. Who teaches a river to walk? Do mountains lie down? Is a bird disappointed with air? Why don’t bones go through the skin ofthe sky? The imagery invokes a primitive literary Mystery, but little insight or revelation. The poet, it seems to me, is still too stunned by the extremity of her recent experience in the Arctic to meditate effectively on its significance, to convey its complexity, its sheer weirdness. There is too little of Ehrlich’s usual attentive ness to physical detail and its interconnecting metaphors. It’sonly fair to remind the reader again that the poem-cycle is intended as part of an elaborate collaboration. But reading the poem-cycle out of that context disappointed me. Again, in her foreword, Ehrlich says far more than she may intend when she asks Siobhan Davies what the ballet is about. “Oh, I don’t know,”Davies replies, “something about love and memory and walking.” Regrettably, ArcticHeartleaves me with the same sense of itsvagueness. DAVIDAXELROD La Grande, Oregon Saturn Is Mostly Weather: Selected & UncollectedPoems. ByGene Frumkin. (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 1992. 96 pages, $9.95.) This elegantly-producedvolume provides afine introduction to the workof an important poet who has lived in New Mexico since 1966. Frumkin has been publishing poems for more than thirtyyears and shows a striking range and an impressive power of development. He has worked with surrealism without losing touch with the particular: this book contains some outstanding surrealist poems from the late Fifties and a good helping of the poems in which he has brilliantly captured the NewMexico aura. Hisfrequent sojourns in Hawaii have led to poems evoking that ambience also. And Frumkin remains one ofthe best love poets of our time, capturing a variety of erotic moods, from the earthy to the tenderly elegiac, not to mention the humorous. His book-length poem, Comma in theEar, with its exploration of Language poetry and literary theory, has not been represented, but much of his other major sequence, The Mystic WritingPad, is reprinted. In The Mystic Writing-Pad, Frumkin explores the extremes ofopacityand transparency in perceptual terms drawn from a famous essaybyFreud on the workings ofthe mind. He explores an abundance of polarities—light and dark, ideal and sordid, systematic and chaotic—with wit and subtlety. Acomparable new poem is Stagesin Assemblinga Mirror, which looks at the male conception of the feminine. And another new sequence, The Mandelstam Poems, is a powerful homage to the great Russian Reviews 277 poet. Like Mandelstam, Frumkin is a poet of technical virtuosity and deep emotional resonance. At the same time, he is a poet of ideas, writing as easily about the construction of the self through discourse as about the Canyon de Chelly and Taos. Cinco Puntos Press has provided uswith an opportunity to take a close look at the long and distinguished career of a poet who always strives to transcend himself. BERTALMON University ofAlberta TheFirebirdPoems. By Gerald Locklin. Edited by Donna Hilbert. (Palm Springs, California: Event Horizon Press, 1992. 134 pages, $12.95.) Since the release in 1967 ofhisfirst collection, SunsetBeach, California poet Gerald Locklin has published more than 50 volumes of poetry, prose, and scholarlywork. This latestcollection, TheFirebirdPoems, mayverywell extend the reputation of a poet described by Charles Bukowski as “one of the great undiscovered talents ofour time.” Editor Donna Hilbert has collected 99 poems that “show the range of Gerald Locklin’sstyles aswell as the wide range ofhis interests.”Earlier poems, for example, reveal the poet’sstruggles and experimentswith poetic constructs. These serve well as counterpoints to later works characterized by a style that is leaner, more precise, even conversational. Readers also encounter a wide vari etyofperspectives—that ofthe husband, father, professor, friend, critic, enemy, son, and so on—on an impressive range of subjects: children, wives, lovers, modern art, ski lifts, Pink Panther cartoons, life in L.A., chili, even Gerard Depardieu’schin. In the collection’s introduction, Edward Field writes that if there is an ideological bent to Locklin’spoetry, it is the poet’s “defense of the male spirit.” However, the messages of the poems herein must not be confused with the...