Western American Literature

EssayReview Nebraska:A Poem. By Greg Kuzma. (Crete, Nebraska: Best Cellar Press, 1977. 25 pages, $3.00.) VillageJournal. Pebble #17. By Greg Kuzma. (Lincoln, Nebraska: Greg Kuzma, 1978. 168 pages, $5.00.) OfChina and ofGreece. ByGreg Kuzma. (New York: Sun, 1984. 108 pages, $7.00.) A Turning:A Sequence. ByGreg Kuzma. (Urbana, Illinois: Stormline Press, 1988. 44 pages, $5.95.) Greg Kuzma, a poet at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, came to Nebraska in 1969 from Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. In 1977 he published Nebraska: A Poem. Its subject is settling in, and as such it is a fine Nebraska poem—much observation, a newcomer’s commentary on the seasons and on how people live in Crete, Nebraska. “This is a place we have learned to live,”he says. At the very end he expresses the settler’s other thought: that he is not fully Nebraskan, that he is still “an Easterner, by birth and maybe inclination.”How does he get from there to A Turning, one of the most beautiful and meaningful Nebraska volumes that I know? He begins (VillageJournal) with experiments, not necessarily Nebraska experiments but many kinds. He experiments with personae, with prose poetry, with place, and with evocations of pain. Imagination goes west in the following lines from “The Wind”: The wind designed the buffalo big shaggy head and a hump below tiny feet and when he runs he runs like the wind having watched it come after him In Of China and of Greece Kuzma writes a necessary volume, apparently centered in personal loss and griefon the death of his brother. From “Letter to My Brother”: 362 Western American Literature DearJeff Now you are dead Big deal You loved speed Big deal So now you are dead in a car And I wake up The poem moves through everykind ofpain and anger and rage and loss to one small stanza at the end: You who were careless and wrong who loved wreckage and despair I will love you in all the fury I can give but I will hold to myself some saving thing some tender thing I will not kill While spending certain kinds of energy on these poems, Kuzma also writes A Turning, both Nebraskan and one tender thing. A Turning is a deliberate attempt, then, to becomeNebraskan, and when Kuzma finished he wasn’t sure whether he had succeeded or not. For me it was pathfinder poetry when I came back to the West after having been East some years. Hear the change from Nebraskain “In the Weed I Looked for the Poetry”: In the weed I looked for the poetry, and in the flower. perhaps it was in the dirt. . . Kuzma says that in A Turning he “gets down to the dirt”—to what isessential in Nebraska and our lives. How like, and different, from Nebraska where he had said “Nebraska’s all dirt”; in New York State the “fields [had been] scattered with rocks.”Kuzma writes small poems here, each a finished work. He gives us a seasonal cycle, beginning in early spring, asking us to stretch our under­ standing. I have been in the ground. Beside me the worm has lain down. . . ( from “Green”) Ultimately the landscape reflects different feelings, emotions, and perspec­ tives than in Nebraska. Instead of observing the landscape and life, he speaks in the multiple images and the language that are the poet’s life. You turn a page and come upon a line like “I would like to believe in a darkness inhabited.” Do you look for extensions of the thought right away, or do you pause? For how long? Look for the literally unanswered in “Tell”: Essay Review 363 Tell me what it means. If I show you the flowers blooming again, and the way the sun has caused the hedge plants under the tree to stretch, will you decode the way the wind rises and stops. It would appear that the rages of VillageJournal and OfChina and ofGreece leave Kuzma the stillness from which to write A Turning, give him the chance to develop forms while absorbing new material into his life. When all these works are read together, even from works...