The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 167

Tom Clark addresses the situation of the poet in an age of diminishing returns Poetic Chronicle Of America's Long Sleepwalk X) ft. i are so blunted that all voluntary exertion dies, and the general public is reduced to a state of near savage torpor, morose, stuporous, with no attention span whatsoever; The recently forgotten Persian Gulf War is remember-; ed by Clark in "Diary of Desert War," a sequence of short prose poems. The placing of each poem dead-center on each page suggests the way most of us experienced that video-arcade event in front of a TV set: "LAVA TRACK THROUGH black ash beyond, another lava-field, older flat rank desert, unfortunate place." The last section of the book, "Dark Continent," is a reconfiguration and condensation of Clark's popular first volume of selected poems, "When Things Get Tough on the Street" (1978). Included are poems such as "New She Dwells Here" and "Nimble Rays of Day Bring Oxygen to Her Blood," which were so influential among young poets in the 70s. Missing are most of the baseball poems and the hilarious sequences "Chicago" and "How I Broke In" that'-seemed to review the passing scene from a bleacher seat in Wrigley Field.

Paradise Lost? Maybe this is the implication of the selection. And what we have as a whole in the "Sleepwalker's Fate" is poetry's first successful X-ray of American psyche as it swims through the '90s. Joel Lewis is the winner of the 1991 Ted Berrigan Memorial Award for Poetry. SLEEPWALKER'S FATE New Selected Poems, 1965-1991 By Tom Clark Black Sparrow; 212 pages; $12.50 paperback, $25 hardcover REVIEWED BY JOEL LEWIS Dn his revision of Percy Bysshe Shelley's dictum, poet George Oppen declared-that poets are legislators of the unacknowledged world. Perhaps it is up to the poet, the hod carrier of our language's potential, to attempt to make a whole of the random and unacknowledged bits of modern American civilization.

Berkeley's Tom Clark has been one of American poetry's most consistent and constant chroniclers of our long sleepwalk to parts unknown. From early poems and prose that celebrated the exuberant Americana of baseball, Damon Runyon and rock and roll, Clark (in such books as "Paradise located the grim American Future in the culture of Southern California "the Southlands" of morning-drive radio disc jockeys. The poems of that period are hard to read in large doses, given their unrelenting bitterness and anger. In his remarkable new volume, "Sleepwalker's' Fate," the anger of those poems has been married to the lush surrealism of early books such as "Stones" and "Air." The affect of this shotgun wedding is indeed much like the experience of sleepwalking, that experience of moving toward something much larger than your brain: It is only mourning for the lost Moment that has preserved like an echo of time In these rustlings from the past What the living moment continues to miss The claim tohappinesshumans find denied Them in this technified diorama world They extract from albums of their idiosyncrasy A hieroglyphic scrap of extinct emotion Set adrift down pathways of forgotten life As the human village prepares for its fate The dream disintegrates but the shadow holds no power In a subtheme to the chronicling of the American narcolepsy, Clark addresses the situation of the poet in the age of diminishing returns: Poetry, Wordsworth wrote, will have no easy time of it when the discriminating powers of the mind Finding the World Between Two Parents A MAN'S PLACE 1 By Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie Four Walls Eight Windows; 99 pages; 15.95 A WOMAN'S STORY By Annie Ernaux; translated by Tanya Leslie Ballantine; 90 pages; $8, paperback REVIEWED BY ROZSPAFFORD jj 'W 1 I rench writer Annie Ernaux describes herself as "the archivist" of her parents' lives. And her quietly astonish live with Ernaux and her children, she is made uneasy by Ernaux's life as a middle-class intellectual, and puts herself in the position of an employee, insisting on doing all the housework, then expressing a worker's rebellion.

Only when, as Ernaux puts it, her mother becomes history does Ernaux feel "less alone and out of place in a world ruled by words and ideas, a world where she had wanted me to live." In writing the book, Ernaux describes herself as struggling to find the exact "sequence of words" that will convey "the truth about my mother." Her efforts at precision shape the book, which has the meticulousness of needlepoint, the scenery emerging one stitch at a time. Ernaux hopes her writing is "a way of giving," and indeed it is, a gift not only to her parents but also to readers. Ernaux has given us her parents, people we come to know and care about, as well as an introduction to the culture and recent history of a particular region and class of people in France. To have done all this in these graceful, understated volumes is quite an extraordinary accomplishment. Roz Spafford teaches writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

ily spoke in querulous tones and polite speech was reserved for strangers, especially for customers. Ernaux literally underscores the importance of words by italicizing key phrases, as in "but, after all, they had to live." She does this, she explains, because these words "define the nature and the limits of the world where my father lived and which I too shared." By becoming educated, being a writer and a teacher, Ernaux feels she has betrayed her origins. This book's intent is to explain to herself how she became separated from her father. By writing, she says, she takes "possession of the legacy with which I had to part when I entered the educated, bourgeois world." This gives Ernaux's apparently straightforward narrative a rich undertone. Ernaux wrote the book about her father to document the distance between them.

In "A Woman's Story," she writes about her mother "because it is my turn to bring her into the world." If "A Man's Place" is, as the title suggests, a static piece, a portrait seen from a distance, Ernaux's grief over her mother's death and contradictory feelings for her give this book more immediacy and movement. Ernaux's mother always had ambitions, moving from the farm to the factory to ownership of a small shop and cafe. She Ernaux: exact sequence of words ing memoirs, "A Man's Place," written alter her father's death, and "A Woman's Story," written after her mother's, are like archives hushed collections of facts, with a minimum of commentary. Ernaux describes her writing as "neutral," with "no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony," the style, she says, of her letters to her parents. The spare writing, the deliberate flatness, give the books their power.

Paradoxically, the power of language is the subject of "A Man's Place," especially the power of language to demarcate social class. Unlike her mother, who tried to adjust her speech to assimilate into the class just above her, Ernaux's father who went from rural worker to factory worker to village shop owner wore his working-class ways, refusing "to use words that weren't from his world." At home, the fam studied the manners of the middle class and valued education: Before she touched a book, she washed her hands. She tried to give her daughter a sense of culture, taking her to museums and monuments. These ambitions, Ernaux suggests, were both honorable and lethal: "In Norman French," she writes, 'ambition' refers to the trauma of separation; a dog, for instance, can die of ambition." Both Ernaux and her mother suffer from this separation and from their reconnections: When her mother comes to.