240 Western American Literature The Clock O f Moss. By Judson Crews. Edited and with an introduction by Corol Berge. (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1983. 50 pages, $3.00.) Ish R iver. By Robert Sund. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983. 62 pages, $7.50.) I’ve been reading Judson Crews’spoetry for twenty years. I have loathed, loved and finally come to respect his work as the years have passed. He is not a poet of vision, grand language or technique. He is a poet of geography, sensuality and honesty. Editor Berge has divided The Clock O f Moss into two parts: “In the Explorer’sHand” and “Landscape with Figures.” The volume contains fortyeight poems split equally between the divisions. Crews’s poems reveal them selves like the travels of an anonymous and classical explorer, moving through the West from primordial to contemporary times. The poet, now in his 60s, is a sociologist and psychologist. His scholarly capability in sociology is much in evidence in his work, as in: How many crushed skulls they found In this old ruin. Was it a way of dying, or was it a way of bringing Death to others? None of them were women, none of them were young Was this a selfish wisdom they had learned — or was it a generous one Snake-skins as well were found in their burial baskets — they knew Secrets deeper than any I have known. His poems echo the concerns that all of us have for the fate of our society. In content, if not in form, the modern poets Crews is most akin to are Charles Olson and Loren Eiseley. Like Eiseley and Olson, Crews’s understanding of history and the biological and social sciences gives an authenticity to his poetry that is compelling. The Clock O f Moss is another entry in Ahsahta Press’s “Poetry of the West” series. It is an important addition. Robert Sund, like Crews, is a poet who shuns abstraction and uses plain speech. He is a native of western Washington, where rivers with names like Duwamish, Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Samish, Skokomish and Skykomish run down from the mountains into the Puget Sound. In Ish River he writes of his home and family with deep understanding. One of his most extraordinary gifts is his ability to write, not only about the land, but about the things used in the cultivation of the earth. In the first of Reviews 241 the “Two Poems from Swede Hill,” entitled “Barn,” he has composed a litany to these objects. Suddenly there are ancient odors! My grandfather’sbarn! Pitchforks lean in the far corner, prongs stuck in old planks. Adim puddle ofoil covered in hayseeds and dust lies under the mowing machine. Cobwebs stretch between rusted tines of the pitchforks. At the bottom of a dusty gallon jug, its cork fallen in, a mouse lieson hisback, twisted in hislastbreath, the unfinished gesturesof life. Sund exhibits a fine ear and has a clean sense of image. He has published only one other volume of poetry. He is now fifty-five years old — a decade younger than Judson Crews. Maybe, with the publication of these books, these two poets will receive the recognition they deserve. J. WESLEY CLARK, Galesville, Maryland First Light. By David Wagoner. (Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown, 1983. 114 pages, $7.95.) David Wagoner’sFirst Light is a richly-textured account of his relation ship with the world, an account which emphasizes his first perceptions. From the childhood self-portrait in “The Truant Officer’sHelper” to the final poem, the title poem of the volume, Wagoner consistently leads the reader from the periphery of that world into the center of his vision, from the perception of the world without to contemplation of the world within, and finally, perhaps, a seeing beyond the forms of the personal world into the cyclic nature of life itself. The poems are arranged in such a way that they contribute to this motion and leave the reader at the end with the sense of the whole cycle’s starting again. In family portraits, we see the beginning edge of the poet’s awareness of himself as a writer. In “The Truant...