Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature

Book Reviews121 contributions to the dialectical or dialogic (the editors view these terms as interchangeable) discourse required to revise and revalue the frontier experience and its role in the expression of the "American Dream." In the midst of reading all this energetic revisionism, however, one smiles and gives a slight nod of recognition to the voice of the following sentence, which measures how far such discussions have come and probably indicates how far they have yet to go: "This loop I toss is wide, encompassing much, but I think it is important to round up as much as possible to prove my point . . ." (103). As the editors readily acknowledge in their introduction, they have included no individual essays on Blacks or Asian-Americans and their writers in the collection, but there are numerous indications in the book of how these groups could be included as the loop is widened, so to speak. Nevertheless, some readers may understandably complain that the Blacks and AsianAmericans should have been gathered in the first roundup. Among the riches offered in this collection, different readers will certainly identify different selections as especially prize-worthy, but one list ofthe most meritorious essays would begin with those of Charlotte S. McClure ("Emily Dickinson's 'Glimmering Frontier' "), Melody Graulich ("An Essay on the 'Legitimate Inclinations of the Sexes' "), John Clark Pratt ("American Myth in the Literature of the Vietnam War"), Joan Penzenstadler ("Frontiers in Chicano Literature"), and Mick McAllister ("Wilderness and Frontier in American Indian Literature"). It should be noted that the volume includes a fully developed, cross-referenced index, a thoughtful and welcome feature in such a collection. Undeniably this collection will stimulate scholars and students alike to rethink the ways in which both the myth and the experience of the frontier animate and inform American literature, for these essays invite us to restructure American literature and to be attentive to those on either side of the frontier (i.e., those traditionally included in the discussion and those heretofore excluded), thereby continuing the process of liberating the canon of American literature. ARTHUR B. COFFIN Montana State University ROBERT DALE PARKER. The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 169 p. It is, in a way, unfortunate that Robert Dale Parker announces early in this text his ambition to "do for Bishop something akin to what Lionel Trilling did for Robert Frost" (21). The comparison is off-putting: Bishop is not Frost, nor Parker Trilling, nor should they be. What Trilling did—not for but perhaps to Frost—was perhaps at the time necessary, that is, to darken the critical lens through which tradition viewed the well loved poems and poet. Parker makes the comparison, I believe, not to achieve some kind of significance-throughaffiliation , but to emphasize the fact that he sees in Bishop's poems great anxieties and ambivalence, and that these, not her discretion and precision 122Rocky Mountain Review of observation, are the dominant traits of the work—the qualities that make her a heavyweight. He is absolutely right, of course. Many critics, including those he acknowledges in his own notes on the remark I quoted above, have already said as much. As I think that example illustrates, Parker seems to address here an audience of ten years ago, an audience among whom there might have been readers hesitant to refer to this poet without using her first name or, worse, "Miss Bishop"—readers Parker feels the need to distinguish himself from in the book's opening. But, finally, this is a minor problem. (The unfortunate thing is that these remarks come early in the text and the reader has to overcome prejudices inspired by them in order to fully appreciate what the book does offer.) Finally, aside from those statements which make the book or the author appear to be a little out of touch (statements which simply should have been edited) The Unbeliever accomplishes its ambitions with a great amount of sensitivity, insight, and charm. Parker enters critical waters which other critics have indicated were there, but he goes deeper and more thoroughly into some of Bishop's most unyielding, difficult poems. He is unafraid ofher gender, her...