Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry by Bonnie Costello (review)

no6 Reviews literary critics have no basis for claiming they are making an original contribution to knowledge and understanding of an author's work. Davidson, Walton, and Andrews are thus caught in a double bind: they are obliged to claim, on the one hand, that they offeroriginal readings of King's work, while on the other hand maintaining that King's writing speaks for itself. What kinds of reading strategies do Davidson, Walton, and Andrews adopt, and what new insights into King's work do they provide? On these questions, there is some variation from chapter to chapter. The introduction and Chapters i and 2 provide useful conceptual frameworks and factual contexts for reading/viewing King's work. I was surprised to learn that King had been employed as a photojournalist in New Zealand and Australia in the 1960s, and was interested to see how his doctoral research at the University of Utah in the mid-1980s fed into his subsequent creative and critical writing. Surprisingly, however, given that King was writing so prolifically during the 1990s, in the context of events such as the Oka stand-off and the Meech Lake negotiations, Davidson, Walton, and Andrews provide little information about the political scene in Canada over the past fifteenyears. None the less, the chapters on 'Comic Contexts' and 'Comic Inversions' use various theories of comedy to illuminate King's authorial strategies. Chapters 6 and 7 on nation, race, and gender are also engaging and, in general, persuasively argued. Chapters 3,4, and 5 are somewhat disappointing, however. The readingoiA Coyote Columbus Story seems laboured and unconvincing, and the interpretation of King's photograph of Lee Maracle entirely overlooks the tricksterish ambiguity of her facial expression. When the authors make uncritical recourse to Bhabha's notion of the 'in-between' space, the analysis often seems heavy-handed and cliched. Given King's warnings in 'Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial' about the limitations of postcolonial ap? proaches to Aboriginal literatures, it was frustratingto see some of King's texts being read in limiting ways. 'Bhabha-ism' is deployed in a way that narrowed King's range of textual accomplishments, focusing repeatedly on contesting 'Eurocentric assump? tions' and disrupting 'Eurocentric linear narratives'. Such arguments rely on stale, essentialistic binary oppositions and monolithically conceived evils?the very modes of thinking that King seeks to undermine as he explores the tragic, hilarious, unpredictable , historically unfinished entanglementbetween North American cultures. University of Sydney Penny van Toorn Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry. By Bonnie Costello. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. 2003. x + 225 pp. ?23.50. ISBN 0-674-00894-4. In this remarkably lucid and intelligent book, Bonnie Costello, with a sensibility attuned to nuance and to the larger picture, selects and moves her perspectives in a manner responsive to her nomadic theme, yet keeps the reader on side and on track. She traces the 'shifting ground' of landscape in six American poets, Frost, Stevens, Moore, Clampitt, Ammons, and Ashbery. Costello argues that theirs is a 'nomadic rather than an expansionist impulse' (p. 1). Of Frost's 'Tree at My Window', Costello notes how the 'tree's iconographic history stands quietly behind' the poet's image and that as with 'the other vertical in the landscape, the tree is available as a medium of self-reflection' (p. 29). Yet after this poem, Frost all but abandoned apostrophe and his major figure for the correspondences between humanity and nature became chiasmus , an indication that the ground had shifted away from the static frame of the human observer. MLRy 100.4, 2005 1107 'The Comedian as the Letter C is revealed as Stevens's 'epic poem of aesthetic colonisation' (p. 54): landscape is the allure of arrival, yet, as Crispin discovers, the journey is always in process and images are parts of a world that is always fluxional. Costello presents a Stevens susceptible neither to dominion nor to alienation but finding landscape adequate and not to be pinned down. If Frost and Stevens acknowledge the contest of flux and frame, Moore is more explicitly moral and political in refuting human claim to the centre. Costello quotes Moore's lines from A Grave', a...

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