Delight and Instruct

Hardcover $50.00
1-890771-51-1

Three sensibilities marry in an uncompromising love for and understanding of the High Sierras: Snyder, Killion, and Muir merge observations in an appealing and colorful book. Killion’s woodcuts, Japanese in style, evoke a landscape whose grandeur seems limitless, whose key features are lovingly captured in an ancient form. Accompanying these, for the first time, are excerpts from Gary Snyder’s backpacking journals from the 1950s onward, “edited by cold and hunger, revised by hunger and cold.” The result is often as spare and rich as poetry, as in this entry from September 24, 1966: “A slope of yellowing aspen / sheered-off / granite boulder planes / Frost first shows on horse turds. / One singing sparrow fills up / the gorge of the Upper Kern.”
Killion points out links between the journals and Snyder’s published poems in a helpful index. An excerpt from John Muir’s 1869 journal sums up the sense of celebration this volume calls forth: “How boundless the day seems as we revel in these storm-beaten sky gardens amid so vast a congregation of onlooking mountains! . . . In the midst of such beauty…one’s body is all one tingling palate. Who wouldn’t be a mountaineer! Up here all the world’s prizes seem nothing.”

Spirit Cabinet
David Wojahn
University of Pittsburgh Press
120 pages
Softcover $12.95
0-8229-5776-0

In amongst the heartfelt elegies to lost persons and lost worlds, Wojahn plants a scathing self-accusation in “After Propertius”: a dream of the dead Cynthia, who accosts the poet mercilessly. “ ‘How goes the poetry, loverboy? Did I give / good subject matter? // Don’t think I haven’t heard your three-year keening. & now it’s given you /—I’ve given you—another little book.’ ” Even in the words of an ancient, Wojahn seems to hear the voice of his own troubled and lost muse, the poet Lynda Hull, whose life, death, and love continue to occasion reflective and illuminating poems. Wojahn is multiply haunted, and the cabinet of the title (a Shaker device, with which believers hoped to encounter the dead) is metaphor for the actions of the poems in this book.
“For the sake of morale the inmates / are permitted to see out,” Wojahn writes of literal prisoners, but the living man in thrall to his ghosts is captive to his memories. From “the child in the rescue worker’s / lemon & black asbestos gloves”—Oklahoma City’s iconic photograph—to the unborn baby mourned for in “Triclinium” with a ritual that involves the burning of a sonogram, Wojahn’s language vivifies each subject before subjecting us to its disappearance: his loss, our loss. The sequence “Crayola” is masterfully innovative as it chronicles and mourns moments in the speaker-poet’s coming of age. The Spirit Cabinet offers a wide-ranging collection from one of America’s most moving poets, writing at the height of his art.

There are so many more fine books available this season from poetry’s best promoters—the independent and university presses—that opportunities for delight are wonderfully abundant, but what of the information, the news that stays news? As William Carlos Williams put it, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”