The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 198

Cecil Beaton's portrait of Marian Moore Skin-Deep Bio of Moore MARIAN MOORE A Literary Life By Charles Molesworth Atheneum; 472 pages; $29.95 REVIEWED BY THOMAS GLADYSZ ne woman's attempt to make a poet of herself is the story of Charles Molesworth's "Marianne Moore: A Literary Life." Unlike the lives of her friends Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, who seem to have been born to their craft, Moore's life offered little inspiration for the creation of verse. As Molesworth relates it, Moore struggled for most of her life with the internal tensions between a Victorian upbringing and modernist aesthetics, devotion to her mother and the pursuit of her own ambitions, and a career goal in an era that frowned upon women maintaining professional lives. Marianne Craig Moore (1887- 1972) was born near St. Louis in the home of her maternal grandfather, the pastor of a Presbyterian church.

Shortly before Moore's birth, her mother left her father after he suffered a mental breakdown. Thereafter, Molesworth suggests, morality and a sense of family unity would shape the poet's life. Mother, daughter and older brother, Warner, drew close together. Throughout their lives, they corresponded frequently, and Moore's mother would sometimes live with the unmarried poet until her death, when Moore was 59. Moore was educated at Bryn Mawr, a progressive all-women's college.

After graduation, Molesworth shows, the poet looked not toward marriage (as her family hoped) but toward work that would enable her to pursue her literary ambitions. She studied stenography and later taught at the Carlisle Indian. School in Pennsylvania, where one of her students was the famed athlete Jim Thorpe. Molesworth writes that while at Bryn Mawr, Moore began writ- ing poems imitative of Victorian models at first and later modernist and idiosyncratic. that would find an audience among the avant-garde.

By publishing in small literary journals such as The Egoist, Poetry and The Dial (which she later edited), she cultivated friendships with Pound, Eliot, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, e.e. cummings, Alfred Kreymborg and others. Moore's first book, "Poems," was published in England in 1921. Friends, including H.D., Molesworth says, championed the project without Moore's knowledge and despite her mother's wishes.

When her "Selected Poems" was See Page 9 WHITLEY STRIEBER BILLY A NOVEL "Heart-slamming. An enthralling nightmare aha if the go vers of evil and innocence I CANALS SONS Voice of Lyric Mysticism PIECES OF A SONG Selected Poems By Diane di Prima City Lights; 206 pages; $10.95 REVIEWED BY JANINE CANAN ieces of a Song" is a se'P lection Francisco of poet poems by Diane San di Prima, chosen from 20 books of poetry published over three decades, many of them printed in different languages throughout the world. From "Thirteen Nightmares" MARIAN FROM Di Prima: a rich new body of mythological material dis- to "Parthenos," the poems A By play the broad range of experience of this tough and sensitive poet. "You can I won't be wistful, let it go wondering later what it could have been like," she writes. Born in Brooklyn of Italian parents in 1934, di Prima made her commitment to poetry at 14, dropped out of Swarthmore and published her first book of poems at age 24.

She bore five children, raised them alone, studied Buddhism and magic, befriended the literati of our time Ezra Pound, Kenneth Patchen, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Robert Duncan, Audre Lorde, Robert Creeley and brought poetry to prisons, mental institutions, reservations, colleges and schools. Di Prima has become a thinking observer, a person of feeling, immersed in life and the fire of knowing. In this new collection, di Prima's archetypes stand out clearly: the fierce Wind, the sacred Beast, the Mother "eternally in labor," the Child "who sings uninjured," the adventurous Daughter, the Lover of "grass holy men," the Poet who shows "enough to to break your forever," the Alchemist who makes precious and mythical," the Goddess "who heals thru darkness" and the cool radiant Star. Chronologically arranged, the poems unfold from strident, sardonic life sketches of di Prima as a young beatnik to more elaborate, expansive and refined visions of the older poet, steeped in the occult yet never losing her fundamental connection to the Earth: "the Revealer, Interpreter of what in the earth." Exemplifying di Prima's mature vision is the profoundly mysterious masterpiece "Loba," a constellation of poems emanating from the myth of the White Wolf Goddess. Always in tune with the times, di Prima has increasingly become a figure of significance in an upsurge of end-of-century women's spirituality, providing us with a rich new body of mythological material.

In "Phosphoros" she writes: There is no quarter in this war against our outdated humanity. We set our feet on our own heads An Unrequited Promise Promise climb to the beloved wrathful form, the female form of what man could be In rhythms that dance, brood, stun and burst, and in a style alternately abbreviated and wordy, unpredictably elegant and blunt, di Prima develops her vision. Her lyricism is often coolly unemotional, insistently down-to-earth, abstrusely occult. With her formal anarchism and her reverence for creative forebears, she honors family, lovers, artists, philosophers and the political and spiritual movements of our time. An utterly idiosyncratic poet of the personal and transcendent realms, di Prima is indeed as she warns in an early poem in the process of merging with her vision.

As we follow her "inner sun," she increasingly becomes like the imagination she has so magnificently described: "holy," "precise," "fierce," "practical," "vast elegant." Janine Canan, a practicing psychiatrist in Berkeley, is the author of 'Her Magnificent Body: New Selected OUR HAPPINESS By Tom Jenks Bantam; 185 pages; $19.95 hardcover, $8.95 paperback REVIEWED BY LAURIE MARKS here is an unspoken promise from a novelist that something is going to happen, something will be delivered. What happens in "Our Happiness," the debut novel by San Francisco writer and GQ literary editor Tom Jenks, is this: Southerner Carl Freeman accidentally kills a redneck, mistaking him for a dog, and secretly buries him. This memory haunts him, rendering him incapable of living a normal life. We learn all of this very early in "Our Happiness," so the book really isn't about the killing as much as it is about the secret festering within Cart: 2 The book skips back and forth through time. We meet Carl liv- his secret angst lacks power.

ing alone on a farm, working as a laborer, getting drunk and hang- The book does have strong ing out with an assortment of li- moments, though. Carl's relationand losers. We witness his ship with his neighbor Frazier, a ars courtship of Kath and their life mean, angry man who steals together later, when he's making things out of Carl's house, is fasciit big as a real estate investor in nating. And, in the beginning, Manhattan. Each chapter dips in- Carl's relationship with Kath has to a different time frame, giving a strange tension; the two come readers a chance to piece togeth- together out of loneliness and a the story themselves, and to desire to be taken care of, and er begin to understand who Carl their clumsy interactions reveal really is and why this is his story.

Carl's vulnerability. The trouble is, nothing seems These pockets are engaging important to Carl. Jenks may and work well as vignettes, but have intended this emotional there's not enough of them to minimalism to show Carl's lack of give us a full picture. We never connection; he is sleepwalking know what makes Carl tick. through life, stunned and jolted by what happens to him.

"Our Happiness" is well writThis works but its ten but unconvincing. In the end, to a point, there is no deliverance for the effectiveness is short-lived bereader. cause Carl isn't that interesting; his lack of enthusiasm makes it difficult for us to care about what a Oakland Macks has conto Kith. Consequently, tributed to Metien and Soma. 0661 26, AUGUST.