cover image THE ROCK ISLAND HIKING CLUB

THE ROCK ISLAND HIKING CLUB

Ray A. Young Bear, . . Univ. of Iowa, $24.95 (64pp) ISBN 978-0-87745-771-8

With its careful synthesis of parable and epic, this fourth major collection by Young Bear creates a stage upon which ancestral voices maneuver into futurity in humorous and compelling ways. Fragments of Meskwaki language inhabit these 23 extended poems, as do an array of burlesque characters. "Selene Nicotine of Pinelodge Lake" for example, "forms herself from the icy night winds," while Young Bear's fictional alter-ego Edgar Bearchild (familiar from Young Bear novels like 1998's Remnants of the First Earth) "uses modern non-electric tools/ to make duplicates of his grandfather's feather boxes"—the latter in "Eagle Feathers in Colour Photocopy." While many of the poems follow the doings of such figures, a linear sense of story often disperses. At times hermetic, the work is nevertheless always sonically delightful and startlingly funny, as in "Summer Trip Dreams and Concrete Leaves," in which Young Bear writes, "Inside the honeycomb-lined tripe intestine/ there is a woman held captive, and I am there with her./ She resembles Debra Winger, the Hollywood actress." "Poems for Dreams and Underwater Portals" nods toward European surrealism, "Through certain readings/ of old documents that visually/ self-translate, we influence the sunlight/ to assume triangle-shaped machinations. Here the purple ink is Animistic." At other times Young Bear's writing is punctuated by a more traditionally meditative voice, such as in "The Mask of Four Indistinguishable Thunderstorms" where "The woodlands horizon/ is therefore/ portrayed as a jagged/ lavender line/ and encircled in yellow/ obviously/ is the sun/ reducing humankind/ making/ known the presence of duality." Working the spectrum from ethnography to poetry, from comedy to tragedy, this is a thoroughly entertaining, yet deeply affecting study in cultural contrasts and similarities. (June 1)

Forecast:The fictionalized memoir Black Eagle Child also appeared in the '90s, but this is Young Bear's first collection of poems in more than 10 years. Fans of the fiction and the poems will want to follow Bear Child's further adventures.