Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poetry ed. by Leilani Wright, James Cervantes

474 WAL 3 4 .4 WINTER 2 0 0 0 blue jay eating suet; juggling three crumpled newspaper balls wrapped with duct tape; tasseling corn; the gravitational bending of light; “We’re dying”; stringing a coral necklace; he drew his equations on butcher paper. (4) And so Sze goes on until he asks, “what is it like to catch up with light?” He concludes: “he threw Before Com pletion: / six in the third place, nine in the sixth” (5). Consistently playful and adventuresome, the form of Sze’s new poems becomes the solution to the questions the poet asks: at a speed approximating the speed of light, the mind constructs a web of mutu­ alities, connective tissue that holds these fragments together. Experiences may recede to a great distance, but the red shift of con­ sciousness nevertheless holds experience, and its multiplicity of meanings, near enough to understand it with painful intimacy. Sze thus achieves something extraordinary: he reinvents elegy, creating a peculiar anodyne for loss. Fever D ream s: Contemporary Arizona Poetry. Edited by Leilani Wright and James Cervantes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. 232 pages, $35.00/$ 16.95. Review ed by Bert Almon University of Alberta, Edmonton Leilani Wright and James Cervantes have compiled a generous selection of poems by thirty-nine Arizona poets, with headnotes pro­ vided by the authors. The brief introduction points out a condition which will be interesting to readers of western American poetry: “Most of the poetry in this anthology . . . grows out of times, places and ideas that are foreign to this state because most of the poets rep­ resented in this text are not native to Arizona” (xvi). William Pitt Root actually shuttles between Manhattan, where he teaches, and Tucson. Arizona is very much a state of migrants, if not of commuters. Much of the literary activity is centered on creative writing programs, which often bring in poets from outside. Norman Dubie, Jon Anderson, Steve Orlen, and Jane Miller made their reputations before they came to Arizona, although writers like Ai and Alberto Rios have built careers from within the state. The headnotes reveal B o o k re vie w s 475 poets preoccupied with the patronage of arts commissions, colleges, foundations, and agencies, and they are more likely to catalog their trophies (grants, prizes, professorships) than to discuss place or even poetics. Readers will find poems about irrigation ditches and tarantulas in the anthology, but the local color is understated. However, this is a trend observable everywhere, for writing programs and founda­ tions esteem the “national” publication. The N ative Am erican and Hispanic poets in the anthology are most in tune with the region. James Cervantes writes wittily about “Aztecs in the U .S .,” and he shows how complex ethnicity and cul­ ture are by tracing the mutating forms of the “Aztec” heritage all over the freeway-land of America. Does Taco Bell count, and what do we make of the Pima cooking tortillas “in Safeway Crisco” ? “Nothing should be borrowed from the Aztecs unless your heart is pawn,” Cervantes tells us (43). None of the ethnic poets in the anthology (they include Navaho, Hopi, and Apache writers, and four Hispanic writers) trades in cultural clichés, but they do have a western flavor. Ofelia Zepeda, “a member of the Tohono O ’odham tribe (formerly Papago),” writes a fine poem on the tumbleweed, the stereotypical western plant, and notes that it is really a Russian thistle (226)! A ll sorts of DNA moves through the Southwest. This anthology exemplifies that diversity and flux. Most important, it is filled with good work: the poem, not the writing degree or the grant, is the only important credential. Jessam yn W est: A Descriptive and Annotated Bibliography. By Ann Dahlstrom Farmer and Philip M. O ’Brien. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998. 416 pages, $62.00. Reviewed by Jacqueline Koenig Fishcamp, California Books were the most important things in the life of Jessamyn West (1902-1984). She would actually tell a hostess she’d rather stay at home and read a book than attend her dinner party. She wanted to read and write and talk about books. Only when such importance...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.