New Acts of Poetry | Emma Lou Thayne, Spaces in the Sage, and Dennis Drake, What You Feel, I Share, and Christie Lund Coles, Speak to Me, and Gale Tampico Boyd, the lost, the found

View PDF

More and more acts of poetry are being committed by Mormons these days. Before me are four volumes attesting to a variety of interests and a variety in printing and format. I am happy to report that the best of these, Spaces in the Sage, appears under a new imprint “Parliament Press,” tastefully done at Bookcraft, inaugurating what I hope is a trend dedicated to the publishing of good things for their own sake. 

What You Feel, I Share, printed by Bookcraft, has an attractive typeface, but is marred by unnecessary illustrations. Speak to Me, by Christie Lund Coles, a poet who has been publishing in Church magazines for many years, would be better without the awkward pen and ink drawings. This brings up the question: do poems need pictures? I would give a resounding “No” if books like Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle[1] weren’t so satisfying, the lost, the found (in lower case) seems to be a successful meshing of poetry and photography, although the poems are not always as good as the pictures. This paperback book is apparently published at the behest of the photographer, Brian Record. 

So much for printing; now to poetry. Dennis Drake is most successful when he forgets his beliefs and concentrates on deeply felt emotion or imagery. This short poem seems to be completely realized (and the beliefs come through too): 

YEAR SUPPLY 

Preparation will not erase for me the fear of famine: 
I have a ravening lust for life, deserved or not. 
Be sure that one poor man will never crave 
Secure and shallow comforts of a grave. 
I wish no quicker end to come 
Than must, and I am dumb 
To think of a red moon 
Or towers of smoke 
That Jesus come. 

Other poems are marred, however, by trite lines like “If you are light, God, I want to be like you.” This ends a poem which begins promisingly as a Laser beam. Some lines seem obvious: “No knowledge is free for the asking / It presumes preparation / assigns obligation.” “A Girl is like a Fawn” has trite images like “Spring-young, a girl is like a fawn / in danger situations” and slack descriptions like “half-frightened, half-curious” and “ripeness, beauty, life.” This young poet needs practice and pruning. The talent is there, but he gives in easily. 

Christie Lund Coles doesn’t try hard enough either. Her first poem “Speak to Me” (previously printed in Dialogue) shows what she can do when she really feels herself into another life. But turn the page and the rewards are trite, derivative lines: “There must be silence / Silence to review the path taken/ and those we must still trod / There . . . must be meditation to renew our faith in God.” I didn’t think anyone would dare to rhyme God and trod anymore! 

“It Is Over Now” is a delicate evocation of lost love:. “It is over now, I am past the place / where the world was hollowed in your embrace.” And there is a nice irony in “Artist:” “In a distant city / they exhibited his pictures/ called them good art / said he was giving / immortality / to the town and people / whose houses he painted / to make a living.” Mrs. Coles has the poet’s soul. She perhaps has not been perservering enough to push for the final image, the best of all possible words. 

Gale Tampico Boyd is in love with words. Her world is swirling with adjectives, most of them clouding the poet’s vision like the insects she describes as “the dainty-winged darlings / become blats of bitter bastings / and the splays of glucky green / and pus yellow / somehow taint the taste of my / preterminal potato chips.” 

She experiments with typography, sometimes making arrangements out of poems. Many of the poems tend to disappear, however, in the pyrotechnics. She is not preachy, though, which I find refreshing. 

There is a fun-loving grace to “Crumpled Foil” in which the poet uses an old piece of foil as a mirror: “I pull a shining sheet of swishing foil / and crumple it / and then unrumple it / and spread it full of wrinkles on the floor / and gaze in it / (to see my face in it) … ” I think we can do without “shining” and “swishing.” 

There is a touch of Joyce in “Lola:” “All falldeerallish kiss was she/ Flanibulously gay — /A sensuabulous young thing / Like a rosybis in May.” And a little poem called “One Dollar Room” has a satisfying grittiness to it: “sink like a smudge pot / dry rot / stink clot / rotted through the brain cells / my hell / oh well … ” I do draw the line at gratuitous exercises like “Trip dream:” “all purgation purple / oozing orange / my mind / a vermillion varminatry / vacuum / vile and viscous.” 

Ms. Boyd is experimental and creative; I hope in the future that she tries harder to penetrate the surfaces. 

Emma Lou Thayne’s book has been selling well. One friend said, “I bought it because I can understand it. The ideas are good.” It’s the same old plague. We do not always understand that an inspiring subject does not a poem make, nor does simple sincerity, not even just deep feeling. If the poet’s voice is not distinctively his own, sounding through the craft, the reader would do better to invest in sermons. 

I believe that Ms. Thayne’s book is successful not simply because the emo tions are those many of us share, but because her motions are well-realized. The quiet voice, the exact phrase combine to make us aware of the art, deeply aware of the images. There is in her work, too, the underlying paradox of life, as in “Heretic:” “Indulge / my searching / my unsteady voice:/You share/ the blame; / it’s You / who gave me / choice.” And “The Middle” which is described as a “brink place” and a “safe place” “where one unbalanced move / could catapult determined limbo / into living.” 

There is a nice attention to detail, a variety of forms, which do not call attention to themselves. She experiments some by arranging short poems to fill a whole page, uses large spaces between words, in the manner of James Dickey, none of which can be shown here. The sonnet is well-represented too. 

Her feeling for nature is evident in such poems as “Pruning the Sage,” and in a group about Lake Powell, showing a penchant for Western scenery which she manages to internalize. The simple cutting of sage from a privet reveals the terror of a snake, finally put to rout by “four violets in bloom.” 

The book ends with a long poem describing the death of a seventeen-year old boy, sustained by dialogue between students who knew him. The young survivors’ first brush with death emerges as “caves too deep to look at in the sun.” It is a narrative poem which builds to a climax. 

Ms. Thayne’s faith in God and in life lives in these poems, but she never preaches. She simply “shows” us her heart, which is how all good poetry should serve the faithful.

Spaces in the Sage. By Emma Lou Thayne. Salt Lake City: Parliament Press, 1971. 60 pp. $2.95.

What You Feel, I Share. By Dennis Drake. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1971. 54 pp. $2.95.

Speak to Me. By Christie Lund Coles. Salt Lake City: Press Publishing, 1971. 64 pp. $2.98.

the lost, the found. By Gale Tampico Boyd. Salt Lake City: Studio West, 1971. 77 pp. 

---

[1] [Editor’s Note: This footnote is an asterisk in the PDF] Anthology for children (and adults) by Dunning / Lueders / Smith, Lothrop, 1967.