We Never Speak of It: Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889-90 [Paperback]

Jana Harris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2003

A new book by the award-winning poet of pioneer life, and a redesigned edition of one of her previous collections. These dramatic monologues depict the real life stories of pioneer women and children who were stranded and settled along the trails of the great Western Migration. Together, the voice of the local schoolteacher and those of her students and their parents illustrate the intimate, unspoken goings-on in and around the mythical frontier town of Cottonwood. Accompanied by historical maps and photographs, this series of linked poems was sculpted out of years of archival research.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Ten years after her award-winning montage of verse monologues, Oh How Can I Keep on Singing: Voices of Pioneer Women, Harris uses the same form to limn a year in a late-nineteenth-century farming and mining area on the Idaho-Wyoming border. Frances Stanton, the teacher at a one-room school, is the primary speaker and the strongest, most complex, most thoroughly realized character. Most of the other speakers are students and their mothers. Only three men speak: a young miner, an abusive husband whose wife has sought Frances' help to prepare her day in court, and a teenager whose lust for horses leads to tragedy and prison. The mothers testify to hardships past and present; the girls bear witness to youthful freshness of vision but also, with earthy candor, to the bullying of boys. Scattered throughout the book are old photographs of people who lived the life of the poems and their frontier world. Harris' earlier book was successfully dramatized, and this book, too, would make a splendid performance piece. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

The work of Jana Harris is unique in American writing. -- Alicia Ostriker

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Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Ontario Review Pr; 1 edition (April 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865381097
• ISBN-13: 978-0865381094
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,626,725 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3.0 out of 5 stars Good., May 20, 2005

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Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: We Never Speak of It: Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889-90 (Paperback)

Jana Harris, We Never Speak of It: Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889-90 (Ontario Review, 2003)

We Never Speak of It starts out with a bang, as good poetry books probably should; "Crossing Lava Creek," a poem that (and I feel like this is a spoiler) describes what can only be a tornado coming out of nowhere, but doing it in such a way that it's hard to tell it's anything but an everyday storm. Just, in other words, in the voice of its eleven-year-old narrator.

What happens after this is really the deciding factor as to whether this book is or is not one of the best books of poetry I've read in the past few years, and I still haven't figured that out. Either Harris is so in tune with her subjects, and manages to use the diction in which they speak, so much that the time period in which these poems take place becomes second nature, or the poems themselves slide into the realm of the good rather than the realm of the fantastic. (The end result is the same; everything that comes after "Crossing Lava Creek" seems rather an anticlimax, even the other storms.) The difference between the two is whether it's a conscious trick of technique (as in, say, the novels of Cormac McCarthy) or whether familiarity, in this case, bred contempt. I am more than willing to give Harris the benefit of the doubt, and wouldn't have even considered the other possibility save that such a talent is so very rare; as readers of McCarthy will attest, using such a rhythm so that it is both effortless for the author and for the reader is even more rare. If that really is what's happening here (and reading a few more books by Harris, which has shot up my list of priorities as I made my way through this, should tell me if it is), then, as is becoming increasingly common in the past few years, I have uncovered another seemingly overlooked gem in the pantheon, another poet whose work is in desperate need of being read by, well, anyone and everyone. If not, it's a book chock full of good, solid work, and should be read at least by those with a liking for poetry, for history, and especially for the combination of the two.

This rating may go way up in the future. *** ½