Emerald Ice by Diane Wakoski (1989)

Reviews 267 Yet Ghrystos is not merely pointing an accusing finger at the government and at politicians. She levels at white liberal women, for example, the same impatience and scorn'she showed a hit-and-run driver. In “White Girl Don’t” she writes, [Don’t] tell me about El Salvador or Nicaragua especially if you go there for an educational vacation Tell me about First Street in Seattle ... Tell me about the uranium pilings we’ve built our houses out of down in Four Corners . . . challenging her readers’ concerns over the plight of whales, apartheid, or prison conditions in the Soviet Union and insisting we look instead at any street in America. If Chrystos were a less skilled poet, she might be content to voice her outrage and leave us with her words ringing in our ears. Yet there is a message of hope: winding its way through the book are lyrical love poems, surfacing in unlikely places, often following poem after poem of despair and outrage. The love poems look less dense on the page;with shorter lines, and more white spaces, they seem to float out over that harsher world. These images of dance, or beauty and embrace sparkle like jewels set among so many hard stones. In the opening lines of “Galloping”: “through gold our hooves / spin autumn stars” we hear a gentler voice, or in her masterful “Meditation for Gloria Anzaldua” at times the voice becomes even playful: “I’ve got so much more to get away with / before there is no more. . . .” The poetic flights of love and of word play are gracefully combined in that poem’s stunning ending: I want to take our breath away like this eagle diving for a shrew I want to go where all the wings are ANDREA LERNER University of Arizona Emerald Ice. By Diane Wakoski. (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1988. 343 pages, $20.00/$12.50.) As good poetry does, each selection of Emerald Ice calls to be read, experi­ enced and not abstracted upon. Clear, strong images and lines beget through­ out this diverse and complex collection a pith one always looks and hopes for in poetry. Wakoski’s imagery compels both the reader’s senses and mind. In the title poem, recurrent images of basil (“pungent and thick and green”) and emeralds (“liquid hardness . . . / contrasting with the chalky softness of the 268 Western American Literature snow”), vital green both, oppose living and not-living, life and not-life images (“What could matter if life / was really about sex / instead of learning / to / die / ”). An orgasm compares to “eating the best / fresh-leaved pesto on home­ made noodles,” and contrasts to emeralds in the following stanza when the poet asks if “women dream / the Saturnian ice of emeralds and sapphires / because men never touch them?” The poem likewise holds private images (“. . . men who rode motorcycles into the living room, once, / . . .the Silver Surferwho might travel with me,”), many of which reflect on earlier poems and collections. Through these images, the reader is made to recognize that Emerald Ice contains not just the poet’s consciousness, but also the sources of that consciousness. At the same time, all Wakoski’s imagery (in, to highlight a few works, “The Mechanic,” “George Washington’s Camp Cups,” and “Duchess Potatoes”) universalizes experience to dispel any notion that, though she is a westerner, she is a regionalist. Perhaps most important, though, remains the refraction of experience through time. The collection filters a quarter century of the poet’s life, a quarter century which provides the reader an opportunity to witness the growth and learning only time brings. Love and life resonate and change, and Emerald Ice contains those resonances and changes. BILL BAINES Truckee Meadows Community College Pulling Leather: Being the Early Recollections of a Cowboy on the Wyoming Range, 1884-1889. By Reuben B. Mullins. Edited and with an introduction by Jan E. Roush and Lawrence Clayton. (Glendo, Wyoming: High Plains Press, 1988. 219 pages, $10.95.) Published fifty years after the author’s death and a century following the events described, Reuben Mullins’ Pulling Leather is an authentic and read­ able first hand account of cowboy and...