\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWworld by perceiving original aspects inthe natural and human environments.Thus the poetic discovery of Canadabecomes a process of naming in the Adamicsense, involving the inhalation of thespiritual breath and the utterance of thename. In several of the poems this pronouncedvision of country assumes amanifold perspective, as in "Eight waysof spending an evening on WhitsunLake," the octet of haiku reminiscent ofthe amusing sentences of Wallace Stevens,ranging in mood from the metaphysical"The owl's eye is / a chink inthe barn, ajar / for mice to enter" ; to thewhimsical "Ravens on fence posts / sit asblack as telephones, / expecting a call";to the sentimental "Just warm and alive,/ the three of us, you, I, and / the firstbutterfly." In this respect, whether theline is short and monosyllabic or, as elsewhere,long and polysyllabic, the meaningsof all these poems emerge in the actof reading itself, rather than in the processof reflection or analysis, somewhat asthe taste of food emerges in the act ofchewing and swallowing, rather than inthe process of digestion. (Whether thisundigested verse is intelectually nourishingis another question entirely.) In hisconcluding piece, "A poem as a question,"Nash develops a metaphor of husbandryas mastication and poetry as husbandry,taking the form of a series ofquestions on the meaning of growth anddecay, concluding: "Does anger have amouth to eat? / or the dumb man atongue / to sing himself asleep?" Thusdoes the poet encourage us to feed on theharvest of poetry and to articulate ourwhole consciousness.An even more consistently animalorientedcollection of poems — indeed akind of bestiary based on a zoologicalpoetic — comes from St. John Simmons,whose wilderness verse has the exotictaste of game that as one eats one canstill see running wild. His world is one ofman, animal, plant, and stone interconnectingenvironmentally, with no oneelement dominating the others. In "AnEvening Song," for example, Simmonsponders the dreaming death of a childenfolded by nature, beginning: "Here,the wolf. / There, the lilac. / Between theshadow of the boy / who wouldn't live. /Falls purple as a desert sunset." The followingstanzas readjust the elements butdo not upset the balance of nature; andthe poet seems to compose his verses notonly to imitate but also to maintain thisbalance.Prominent among the poems is thefigure of the child, who appears to representthe poet in the wilderness of language,in awe of his environment butunthreatened by it. The opening poem,"In My Mouth the Young Boy Dances,"captures the child-poet relationship andinaugurates Simmons' own treatment ofingested verse, involving the tasting ofexperience and the perpetuation of experiencein the mouth of the singingpoet, in particular the child's entry intothe world of experience. In "The ChildrenAsked Me to Kill You," for instance,beauty is the murder weapon andthe children innocently sound a chimemade of their dead mother's bones.Through this kind of unusually graphicimagery Simmons encourages us to recoverwhat in the masterful prose poetryof his preface he calls our "domaineperdu."The best among this mélange à six ofbooks demand the least commentary aswell as the highest recommendation, bothsteve mccaffery and Louis Dudek offeringextremely understated reflections onpoetry that seem to say more than poetrycan say for itself.McCaffery's reflections take the formof aphorisms and epigrams and assumethe format of a journal, each entry comprisingat the top of the page a whimsicalhistorical or temporal reference and at185