The Beauty of Sin

reviewed by Kent Chadwick

In the Bank of Beautiful Sins
by Robert Wrigley
Penguin Books, 1995
79 pages, $12.95 Paperback

In the Bank of Beautiful Sins, the fourth book of poetry by Lewiston, Idaho poet Robert Wrigley begins haltingly. The first poem is entitled "Aubade," a beautiful word for music played at dawn or for the song of a lover's morning parting, but the poem's first image is of a "sun-baked day." There is canyon air that can't sleep; there is fire but also river ice. Mixed images rush together muddying the sense of the poem, while some stilted phrases, such as "if I have sworn my loathing for the sun and cursed the salt," give it an affected air. Yet a woman in moonlight, and nothing else, steps a little wider apart and Wrigley brings a new sensuality to his already distinguished verse.

Wrigley's earlier poems were often historical, like the miners' sequence in the "The Sinking of Clay City," or about parents and grandparents, or about the flora and fauna of the Snake and Clearwater River valleys where he lives. Wrigley teaches at Lewis-Clark State College and has won a number of poetry awards, from Poetry magazine, the Pushcart Prizes and the National Endowment for the Arts among others. Through careful detail his poems have built a sense of place.

In the Bank of Beautiful Sins succeeds in building senses of passion and pain. The poems grapple with adolescence, sex and religion. Both God and Satan are in attendance, though Satan, as expected, gets the better descriptions - the lynx at Ice House Spring sits, Wrigley says, where the "blackberry canes grow thick and gray as Satan's wrists."

The second poem, begins:

MAJESTIC The only word for it, his white Lincoln's arc from the crown of the downriver road and the splash it bellied in the water. The three witnesses keep pumping, breathing and holding the driver's airway straight, but they can't save him. They can only marvel at the tattoo they find under the high collar of his vestments of "... Christ Himself hung out, crucified / to the pale, hairless flesh by needles of India ink," and at the appearance of the owl above them as they say "... each in his turn / what we thought might be a prayer."

Wrigley develops a strong excitement with these initial poems, the third of which describes the narrator at age twelve who has climbed up a great oak to his nest where he smokes and watches the pond from on high. What "young men and boys dream so often" happens - a neighbor comes for her bath, and he watches...

...until I could not breathe-- breasts, hips, dark bed of hair-- and I knew with what sure grinning ease my father's god could send me plummeting into the air. The boy doesn't fall, but grows into the oak as another woman appears, kisses the bather's hands and laughs and touches until evening, until the boy's legs are "bristling, bloodless," until he is ushered "into what had always been" a new world " where nothing is nothing, and love is a sin."

These first poems climax with "Angels," an exquisite scene of adolescent love-play in the bedroom of absent parents. The girl uses her father's gold razor and her mother's fine china bowl to shave the narrator's legs; she kisses the rubies of blood that rise; she blows on the polish she has painted on his nails:

We didn't speak, we didn't need to: the negotiations of young flesh, this for that, mine for yours-one more coin in the bank of beautiful sins. Six years ago in a conversation with Native American poet Sherman Alexie, I mentioned I was impressed by Wrigley's work. Sherman's summation was, "Wrigley wishes he lived a hundred years ago. I don't." Sherman saw a nostalgia in Wrigley's poetry, a nostalgia that he didn't share; 1889 was not a good year to be part of the Spokane or Coeur d'Alene nations.

Now Wrigley has chosen a painting of Persephone by the most nostalgic of 20th century American painters, Thomas Hart Benton, for the cover of this new book and for the subject matter of one of its poems (below). Benton's painting is masterfully composed and Wrigley describes it well. Hades, who has come to take Persephone once again into hell, is an old farm hand "gnarled and nobby," trembling inches from her naked youth. But the problem with nostalgia is that it leaves out something important. What Benton has left out of his painting is the aggrieved woman in this mythic triangle-Demeter, the earth goddess, Persephone's mother, who will curse her realm with winter in grief for her stolen love. Wrigley senses that Benton has left someone out, but unfortunately he glosses in hypothetical wolves instead of driving down to the missing figure of an angry Demeter. Interestingly, Rita Dove has recently published poems specifically about Demeter.

Later in the book, Wrigley comes close to drawing in Demeter. The wife in "Ulysses" begs and curses her husband who has filled the "shaft of absolute blackness in him" with the body of another woman. But in the very next poem, titled for the mythic wronged woman of our time, Sylvia Plath, Wrigley fails to address the core of her anger and anguish and madness. Instead he ends quickly with platitudes: "... we must save the children, we must never look too hard at the sea."

Wrigley's poems are strong and beautifully honed. His best are like the narrator in "The Bramble" who burrowed into a "cathedral of thorns, brambly fist" found a funereal Pierce-Arrow and saw "two bodies skinned by years and the bones inhabited by berries." Wrigley knows where he needs to go in "Poetry," the last poem in this volume, which ends with him pointing to "this great, odd, and unfathomable drive toward the dark."

Kent Chadwick's Northwest Books is a regular column about writers and books from the states and provinces of the Northwest. Kent, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in Union, WA.

Researching the Right

Review by Mary Carroll

Roads to Dominion
Right-Wing Movements and
Political Power in the United States
by Sara Diamond
Guilford Publications, Inc., 1995

A commonly stated belief is that those who do not read or understand history are condemned to repeat it. Seeking to combat this, Sara Diamond, who holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, has written a thoughtful, well-documented analysis of the birth to the ascendancy of the New Right Movement.

Her extensively researched work is non-judgmental in tone and scholarly in presentation, but can be frightening depending on a reader's point of view. This is not an "easy reader". However, it is a solid, well-organized volume that will lead readers to a better understanding of the fifty year quest for power by the merging right wing movements.

To think of those riding this wave as mere zealots or anti-abortionists, or anti-anything else, would be a mistake and would be a disservice to the people within the various movements that comprise the right wing. The vast majority of them believe seriously and passionately that they are right. Their beliefs are good and true. Towards this end they not only want us to do as they think, but also to think as they think. The right wing is marching steadily onward to promote their chosen beliefs and dominate the national political scene.

Dr. Diamond presents more than just a narrative of the right's history in the United States. She also shows how the various movements have interacted with government agencies over time. She displays how political movements are central, not marginal, to routine political decision making. We need to understand how and why this is happening and her book is an excellent road map.

Dr. Diamond answers in clear detail such questions as: Is the right wing racist? And are all members also members of the Christian right? She touches on the details of the impact of Watergate on the conservative movement. We are shown the history of grassroots anti-Communist organizations such as the John Birch Society as well as the impact of Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign. She examines the Reagan era and the Iran Contra scandal. She includes the strategy of violence and its contribution to the growing, thinking entity that is the new right movement.

How have they arrived at this height of power? Dr. Diamond demonstrates the right's skill in fund raising, their use of PACs (political action committees), and think tanks. She documents their use of world crises, communism, and the cold war for their own benefit. She clearly shows how these groups manipulate family and morality issues, and exposes their skilled use of media. Her research continues right up to the 1994 elections.

Her conclusions to this large and detailed work give us a glimpse of where the new right ultimately hopes to go in an era of "moral righteousness" and economic severity. We should read and listen with great attentiveness to Dr. Diamond's clear analysis. This is a powerful movement which is still growing. Only by making the effort to understand it can we hope to counter the right.

SELECT LITERARY CALENDAR

All events are free. Please call in advance to confirm.

August 9 at 8 PM, Elliott Bay Books: Barbara Findley, Nomy Lamm, and Inga Muscio read from Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, a widely praised new anthology.

August 10 at 5 PM, Elliott Bay Books (1st S. and S. Main, Seattle 624-6600) - Activist and historian Gar Alperovitz presents The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: And the Architecture of an American Myth, which presents startling evidence that most military advisers agreed that use of the nuclear bomb was unecessary to gain Japan's surrender.

August 15 at 7:30 PM, Elliott Bay Books - Douglas Unger reads from his long-awaited novel Voices from Silence, a powerful book set during Argentina's military dictatorship.

August 21 at 5 PM, Elliott Bay Books - Oakland journalist Gary Rivlin discusses his newest book, Drive-By, a haunting account of black on black youth violence.

August 24 7 PM, University Book Store (4326 University Way NE, Seattle, 634-3400) - Stimson Bullitt, esteemed Seattle lawyer, scholar, and writer discusses his new memoir, River Dark and Bright..

August 25 at 7 PM, Elliott Bay Books - Vikram Chandra reads from his first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, a complex book fusing 18th century Mogul India with modern U.S. pop culture.

September 27 at Puss 'N Books (15788 Redmond Way, Redmond, 885-6828) - Banned books Read-a-thon.

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Contents on this page were published in the August/September, 1995 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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