Open Country by George Amabile

To Keep and Re-read

Readers put off by the flimsy format, poor design, and amateurish illustrations — as I was — would be well advised not to let their distaste prevent them from reading (and buying) this chapbook. Mr. Amabile is an unusually talented writer; and these twenty-five poems, though quite uneven in their literary merit, all have attractive, engaging qualities that on the whole outweigh faults and blemishes. Since his admirable first collection, Blood Ties (Sono Nis Press, 1972), Mr. Amabile has extended his range not only in terms of subject matter (more treatment of local and prairie themes, for instance), but in the relaxed and flexible tone of his style as well. In the relatively small number of fully successful poems in Open Country, there is a maturity of content — fusion of thought, emotion, and technique — that augurs well for the further development of his art. Anyone who can make of a particular scene a precis of a whole way of life and weave in a range of symbolic resonances — and keep this complexity in vivid balance — has completed his apprenticeship and achieved mastery; I quote from “Red River Wedding”:

On the far shore
families gather around a blaze
that changes driftwood into solid/
glare
singing in the wind and meadow/
grass
of pleasures vast as the edge of a/
prairie day

Children play near the forest
and back out of sight among dead/
leaves
the bride remembers lying naked
sunning herself on the sand at a/
bend of the stream
while the groom dreams of horses
and rain

Soon they will walk
in their stiff clothes
like symbols of snow and midnight
from oak shadows into the light
that turns this chilly water into/
wine

“The Gift”, “Prairie”, “On the Beach,” and “Earthfall, Softly” are the other poems which I find of unalloyed and permanent interest.

Five superlative poems out of a twenty-five total is not a bad average in these days of laxity in and even indifference to artistic standards among many poets. But one feels that Mr. Amabile could do better and that his aims are higher than the majority of poems in Open Country would suggest. Most of the weaker pieces have sections of great brilliance:

A jet floats like a silver seed
above the streets
in which everyone rides bicycles
that unzip rooster tails from/
standing rain
and the sun appears
over the roofs of open houses

Hawks and geese catch fire
Scarlet bean blossoms
trumpet the unsung histories of/
the rooted world

(“Wake Up”)

This feast of imagery, vocabulary, and rhythm is spoiled by the last two lines, which over-extend and strain the metaphor and make it too clever, too fanciful to sustain the reader’s acquiescence: ‘where echoing sunprints light the fern recesses/and time is a clean wind all day.’ Similar problems occur to various degree in many other poems; and I don’t doubt that if Mr. Amabile — before allowing it to be published — had spent a few more months with the book, making final revisions and corrections, he would have cleared up many of the difficulties. However, a chapbook may be considered a rehearsal for a larger collection; and I hope I am not being patronizing in my desire to see some of the poems again in improved versions.

Aside from the ones that may be attributed to haste, Open Country contains a number of recurring flaws of specific kind that I find more distressing in that they tend to characterize the writer’s manner of composition and may become habitual. Preciousness:

Yellow or blue
cataract/ waterfall
appleandrose

(“The Whirlpool”)

In the same poem, use of the one-word line as a facile solution for rhetorical dullness: ‘disintegrate/ in a burst of light.’

“Thaw” has the italics bombastic. They swell the words’ modest import to the detriment of the poem: ‘This is the time of timelessness/ Even the dust sings a small song.’

Sentimentality, in “Sunflowers”:

There is no will in this
Our bodies move in a dance which/
no one owns
slipping together into a hot grip
leaning back on still arms
pouring love out to the shoals of/
space

I watch the stars approach
opening filmy auroras
pink yellow and blue
like first thoughts of the sky/
imagining you

The second stanza of “Sketch for a Portrait of Free Time” is too long to quote, fourteen rather bad lines, and all in one long unpunctuated sentence. The length of the sentence is not one required by its structure or by anything it says or even the way it says it (unless inflation is a valid purpose); it amounts to a mere exercise in accumulating clauses and phrases. It is likely that punctuating would have clarified the weakness of the sentence to its author who might then have made several stronger sentences out of it. A strict policy of leaving out stop signs much narrows the effective range of versification.

In conclusion, and worst of all, exaggeration, as in “Let’s Pretend”:

If we kiss in a pub
the bouncer is paid to warn us
that we are blaspheming the god/
of indecent exposure
If we take off our clothes and/

touch in the park
morality squads will break it up
with hysterical sirens, tear gas and/
cold water

Unless Mr. Amabile were gay (which he is not) and his lover a handsome young man (which she is not, being, as described, a beautiful young woman), the above lines have no credibility or authenticity in reality or as symbol, since they are not prepared for by any peculiar circumstances that would explain them.

The last ten poems in Open Country are from a longer suite titled “First Myth of the Sun,” a series of love poems that share the faults and virtues of the rest of the book. From the excellent “On the Beach,” I quote a passage that well describes some unpleasant consequences of what many people still consider ‘illicit’ love:

This is your knowledge of summer
this cottage and its cliff
that falls yearly into the windy/
lake
I’m not your husband or a casual/
friend
so I walk out into the waves
while you talk to a neighbour
I can tell by your distressed looks
that it’s hard to fit
me into her image of your life

Later you hide
in the crisp shadows of leaves
Afternoon closes around you
like translucent wings
or the stillness of a vast/
imagination
in which the days of your/
childhood
open like petals of inner light
but the breeze carries
the warmth of your face to mine
I wait for you to surface and be/
with me

It is beautifully controlled work such as this that makes the book, with all its faults, one to keep and re-read.

—S.G. Buri