Who Shall Be the Sun?/The Pregnant Man
Taylor, Anya
Myth and the body WHO SHALL BE THE SUN? POEMS BASED ON THE LORE, LEGENDS, AND MYTHS OF NORTHWEST COAST AND PLATEAU INDIANS David Wagoner Indiana, $9.95, 125 pp. THE PREGNANT NAN Robert...
...To the fire he sings one of REVIEWERS monsignorgeorgeg...
...A comparison with Ted Hughes's Crow inevitably comes to mind, for Crow speaks as Totem animal of a predatory tribe—ourselves—narrating the convulsive birth of horror, crunching bones and ripping guts, in a revulsion against being...
...combines renditions of existing Indian stories, such as the title story of the coiling serpent who wins the contest to be the sun, with poems of his own in the Indian mode—songs for an old voice, songs for dream-catchers, songs of Only-One and of He-Catches-Nothing...
...I recommend this book of poems to everyone who has felt some fatigue with much recent first person poetry, who hungers for a cohesive world view, and who likes stories...
...One welcomes not only a body of congenial and helpful myth to add to our stock, but also the return of the third person narrative poem—someone else's experience...
...Already your breath, pale as fog through a vine-maple, Is rising through shreds of cedarbark toward me...
...Because the voice is simple without being primitive or antiquarian, these attitudes suddenly seem to be vibrantly possible solutions to contemporary malaise...
...The "Song for the Soul Going Away" is a body's lament for newly experienced emptiness, with echoes of Andrew Marveil's "Dialogue between the Soul and Body," describing the easing away of vitality...
...THE PREGNANT NAN Robert Phillips Doubieday, $4.95, 95 pp...
...Does that leave anyone out...
...A series of clowns addresses several paintings of clowns, one a little too close for comfort to William Carlos Williams's opening line, "In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.'' The section on' 'the sacred and the suburban" seems less satisfactory to me, perhaps because the effort to yoke those opposites together is too much of a strain, necessitating farfetched though humorous analogies, like a flotilla of suburban houses loosening their moorings, the decks bearing the tilting figures of housewives, sailing to Wall Street to retrieve their men...
...Anya Taylor David WAGONERS Who Shall Be The Sun...
...FATHER WILLIAM J. RICHARDSON, S.J., is the author of Heidegger Through Phenomenology to Thought...
...But there are jaunty individual poems— "Harlequin & Cock," a wonderful adaptation of the story of King Midas, and the sequence on the European scene (especially the "Chimney Sweeper's Cry"), which suggests that Phillips is more at ease when he does not have to glorify cornflakes and the barbecue pit...
...The fire grows till it warns off the spirits of the First People, who come hungrily staring toward it out of "the thin edge of darkness...
...14 March 1980: 155 the most wonderful of his songs for an old voice: I watch the point of the twirling stick Where you are sleeping, where you will come again...
...A closer resemblance is to John C. Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks, but here more of the songs are Wagoner's own adaptations of Indian themes to our central experience, indicating their availability to us...
...Many of the poems celebrate companionable parts of the body in proliferations of whimsical images: a poem to the skin, toaheart—worn as a watch, a plump purple plum, or a fortune cookie—, to the head—as an empty cartoon balloon and then as a bladder—, to the penis—as first a sprouting hyacinth and then as a "slug from under a rock"—and to the other extremities...
...Robert Phillips's The Pregnant Man is a collection of poems taking off from Dylan Thomas's remark that "every idea, intuitive or intellectual, can be imaged and translated in terms of the body...
...ELEANOR wymard is an associate professor in the English Department ofCarlow College, Pittsburgh...
...a living beyond our private skin!—even if the fictional personage is close enough to ourselves to be recognized and named "Only-One" or "HeCatches-Nothing," solitude and failure passing beyond allegory into character...
...Fog, Fire, and Ice are not out there to observe, but close by to speak to...
...This, the " Song for the Maker of Nightmares," and the "Song for the First People" seem truly to serve the function that myths have always served: to ease even children through terrible passages...
...DOROTHY DOHEN is professor of Sociology at Fordham University Lincoln Center and the author of Nationalism and American Catholicism...
...HIGGINS isSecretary for Special Concerns of the United States Catholic Conference...
...In both these forms the poems make available for many of us unfamiliar with them a fund of native American myths presented in a public voice, important in being wider than the fragmented confessional voices that have prevailed for so long...
...Eliot's and Pound's desire to rediscover a common tradition by amalgamating European myth is here being reconstituted on native grounds, in a way that not only makes us nostalgic for values the white man eradicated, but gives us a basis for re-establishing these values of attentiveness to and respect for the processes of life...
...ROBERT EMMET long recently published The Achieving of 'The Great Gatsby': F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920-1925 (Buckness University...
...Wider comparisons with primitivism as it has been revived since the mid-eighteenth century to revitalize the exhausted materialism of civilization are inevitable...
...Another series, beginning with the title poem, which uses the cliche of the male artist giving birth to his poem amid flamboyant struggles and groans (an image by now somewhat tiresome, especially to women) describes different states of being—the Empty Man, the Invisible Man, the Cultivated Man, and the Married Man—each craftsmanlike, inventive, single-dimensioned, and charming...
...This macabre element crops up in Wagoner's poems occasionally, as in "The Man Who Ate Himself," but generally Wagoner's myth urges us into its listening life, rather than drawing the primitive over to express our twentieth century degradations...
...Commonweal: 156...
...Open your dark-red eye, Firebrother...
...anya TAYLOR teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and is the author of the newly-published Magic in English Romanticism (University of Georgia...
...Acknowledging directly the life and worth of things, the poet whispers to the fog, "Your song will be the silence between their songs, / Your white darkness will teach them, / You will wrap all love and fear in a beautiful blindness...
Vol. 107 • March 1980 • No. 5
