cover image My Name Is William Tell

My Name Is William Tell

William Stafford. Confluence Press, $11 (78pp) ISBN 978-0-917652-96-7

Acccording to Stafford ( Passwords: Poems ), our lives are full of ordinary miracles whose effects reverberate throughout time and space, changing existence forever. He writes: ``Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now, / you could close your eyes and go on full of light.'' Yet there is pain in living a finite life in an infinite world. Stafford seems to believe in the soul, but there is the fear of the unknown to contend with after ``our selfish / bodies . . . crash and ignite the soul / to spark, or maybe to spark, maybe to smoulder.'' With language that is sometimes surreal, sometimes religious, Stafford conveys the inherent primordialism of life's everyday occurrences. Of standing in a tidepool, he writes: ``It stirs now and then to bring / faint news of old storms deeper than the earth.'' This vision is ultimately a transcendent one; evidence of the metaphysical is to be found everywhere--in nature, in other human beings, in our own minds. These are wise poems, written by one whose powers of perception have been strengthened by years of aesthetic and emotional analysis of his life experiences, and infused with the kind of reassuring enlightenment and reason that readers have come to expect from Stafford. (Aug.)