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Reviews 185 abandoned farmhouse, mules, toads, meadow larks, and trucks changing gears. However, the prevailing tone is not nostalgia but rather the excitement of the living present, nor is the location always a mountainside or a flood plain. The poets represented here include some fairly well known and many lesserknown writers. The variety ofpoets isas one might expect from the West: Sandra Sisneros, Jim Simmerman, Joy Harjo, Alberto Rio, Tess Gallagher, Frank Stewart, Alan Chong Lau, Linda Hogan among them. Of the poets, perhaps Raymond Carver’s reputation is the best established, but we will be seeing more of the manyother promisingyoungerpoetswho gain exposure here. Taken as a collage of western living, the poems unite to fulfill Gonzalez’s belief in the values of poetic insight not usually offered by familiar historical accounts. JAMES R. SAUCERMAN Northwest Missouri State University Lima Beans and City Chicken: A Memoir of the Open Hearth. By Martina Durbin. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989. 172 pages, $16.95.) Martina Durbin grew up in Fontana, California, where her father was a millwright at Kaiser Steel. The menu in her title refers to the lean times when paychecks were inadequate or when the workers were on strike and had to make do with pseudo-chicken drumsticks made of ground veal (then cheap), mixed with an egg, lots of bread crumbs and a chopped onion, and then rolled around an ice cream stick. But for a doting daughter, all the times were good, full of wide-eyed wonder, excitement, hilarity, and love. In her reminiscences, Martina Durbin invites us into her family and circle of friends, hands us a cold beer, potato chips, Kielbasa, and other refreshments, and tells us a barrel full of stories about the working men and their wives and girlfriends, their pranks and jokes, their brawling and hellraising. Martina, whose father nick­ named her Muggsy, celebrates her family—her Hungarian grandfather who poured coffee into his saucer and strained it through hismoustache; her father, “Jack ‘Red’ Reisz, Scourge of Lorain, Ohio, Terror of Steeltown, Mothers Everywhere Hide Your Daughters, Delight of His Brother’s Life”; her tall, elegant mother, nee Marcia Dombrowski, who could flatten three-story build­ ings with The Look; her “beautiful womanizing uncle” Gibby, her lively Uncle Louie—and their boisterous pals. Booze and flooziesabound. Blue-collar life is a far cry from the life styles of the rich and famous, but Martina Durbin makes it a helluva lot more fun. She loves factories; “Nothing is noisier, uglier, hotter, dirtier, faster, meaner, or more beautiful than a real steel-producing steel mill.” She savors the texture of life in dusty Fontana, “wonderful and crummy”; enjoys the sense of vacation and family closeness during strikes; tries to learn to cuss in three languages while listening eagerly but unobtrusively to the raunchy stories spun by her father and his chums. Certainly she has inherited her father’s story-telling ability, and she recreates 186 Western American Literature the tales with remarkable realism, including the colorful language, and with an irresistible vitality. Her style is both vigorous and relaxed, salty and poetic. This book isfull of laughter and fond remembrances. Its gusto and enthusiasms are contagious; to borrow a phrase from James Thurber, it embraces life instead of straight-arming it. The people “carried with them a built-in readi­ ness to handle whoever and whatever was going to happen.” These are people that John Steinbeck would have liked. The reader will like them too. ROBERT E. MORSBERGER California State Polytechnic, Pomona Willa Cather and the Fairy Tale. By Marilyn Berg Callander. (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. 108 pages, $39.95.) Marilyn Berg Callander’s Willa Cather and the Fairy Tale persuasively traces elements of the fairy tale in narrative design through five of Cather’s major novels. Prof. Callander argues that “fairy-tale elements embroider the fabric of Cather’s work,” and that they are her “primary symbol of romance.” Interestingly, Callander does not see such romance as an aspect of Cather’s own philosophy; rather, “romance ... is as much an illusion as a fairy tale,” and fairy tales “represent illusion in Willa Cather’s canon, superimposed upon winter’s reality...

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