St. George Daily Spectrum, Ann B. Niendorf
Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems, edited by Eugene England and Dennis Clark, is a unique collection of Mormon poetry. England's commentary explains that in the past 30 years, a new tradition of Mormon poetry has emerged.

Traditional Mormon poetry tended to emphasize content over form. The modern poets are "generally university-trained, many of them sympathetic to modern trends in literature and therefore interested in formal skill and experimentation."

England describes these poets as ironic, intellectually playful, skeptical and self-reflexive. Harvest provides several examples of each.

While England comments on the content of the poetry, Clark focuses on the sound of the words. He writes that "Although it can certainly be studied in silence, a poem can only be enjoyed in full voice." He urges poetry readers to read aloud to discover the fullest meaning of the poem.

Clark adds, "The audience of a poem determines to a greater extent than its author, what a poem means." This anthology provides the readers with many fine opportunities to listen to sounds and interpret meanings.

The first poem in the book, "An Early Frost," by Helen Candland Stark, is a good one for those who follow Clark's philosophy of reading aloud. The sounds are as crisp and vivid as the images they represent.

England's emphasis on content perhaps is portrayed by Edward L. Hart's "To Utah." This poem is a refreshingly written account of Utah history.

Much of "Harvest" is refreshing. Those who associate Mormon poetry with "Especially for Mormons" books and other trite cliches will be pleasantly surprised with this anthology. The "Harvest" poems reflect religious values without stating them in flowery phrases or weak analogies.

Daily life, death, marriage, love, pioneers and missionaries are all addressed in this book. But each subject is approached with candid comments and without over-used adjectives.

It would be impossible to select a few poems as representative of this anthology for each poet has a unique voice. Reading a few means reading more to get different perspectives and soon the reader feels a need to study the entire anthology. It's not an easy book to put down, and no doubt was not an easy book to compile.

Harvest is an excellent anthology for readers seeking Mormon poetry that has truly come of age.

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Miriam B. Murphy
Harvest is a good title for this collection of twentieth-century Mormon poetry with its bounty, variety, and degrees of ripeness and appeal. One feels a generosity of spirit emanating from this aggregate, a poetic vision that embraces the mother culture without militancy and looks outward as often as inward. Most of the poems were originally published in LDS periodicals, but a number of the poets have published in journals such as the Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, the California Quarterly, Shenandoah, the Kansas Quarterly, and the Yale Review. These, then, are poets whom "Mormon" identifies but does not necessarily circumscribe.

The poems are, of course, the meat of an anthology, but here the editors have skimped on seasonings and side dishes. They arranged the poets in birth order (from 1901 to 1965), a common organizational device, and divided the collection into those born before 1940 or after 1939, with England selecting the earlier group and Clark the later. No birth years are provided in the exceedingly brief accounts of each poet at the end of the volume, and no outward sign indicates where England's task ended and Clark's began. This is not a trivial matter. It is of more than passing interest whether a poet came to adulthood in the generation of Hart Crane (b. 1899), Robert Lowell (b. 1917), or Sylvia Plath (b. 1932) and before, during, or after which of the century's major wars or social movements, even though few of the poems address the topics of war, civil rights, or the women's movement.

I wish the editors had written brief essays on each poet in the manner of Louis Untermeyer (Modern American Poetry, various editions). For a collection that is a landmark of sorts, the extra effort would have been worthwhile. The editors' comments in lieu of an introduction are sketchy, too. England does the better job of providing a context for the poems, but I wish his essay was longer. Clark's comments present his theory of poetry but do little to acquaint the reader with the diverse group of "younger" poets.

One might question the inclusion of hymn verses, despite their link to earlier LDS hymn writing. Nevertheless, the sweet simplicity of Bruce Jorgensen's "For Bread and Breath of Life" (p. 260) appeals to me. I also wonder at the inclusion of John Davies, Brewster Ghiselin, Leslie Norris, William Stafford, and May Swenson as "Friends and Relations." The editors say that these "first-rate poets" provide "standards for comparison" (p. vii), and indeed they do. Still, their presence shows a little uncertainty that these fine Mormon poets can carry an anthology on their own. They can.

Many of the poets are multi-degreed and earn their livelihoods in academia. Nevertheless, their poems are very accessible. Few display deliberate obscurantism, poetic posturing, or neurotic narcissism. Though accessible, the poems are not necessarily undemanding of the reader. The ten-line "Tag, I.D." by John Sterling Harris (p. 49), for example, despite its simplicity, resonates volumes beyond its thirty-eight words.

Some of the poets succumb to the understandable temptation to write about ancestors, with mixed results. Susan Howe's "To my Great-great Grandmother, Written on a Flight to Salt Lake City" (p. 194) seems forced and the plains-crossing ancestor shadowy at best, while her "The Woman Whose Brooch I Stole" (p. 196) provides concrete detail that gives the poem authenticity. Loretta Randall Sharp's "October 9, 1846" (p. 103), recalling the "miracle of the quail," almost succeeds. The fourth stanza is splendid:

A sudden whir, a throaty trill, the swell
of speckled wings: and the dry beds filled
with food. The quail came, strutting
the camp, tracks faint as scattered chaff.
The pear-shaped birds did not flatten
shy and wild in the grass. Crested heads
pivoted from child to child who picked
them, eyes wide at the bloodbeat of such
feathered fruit.

In the next and final stanza, though, she abandons deft imagery and music to tell readers in prosaic language that a miracle has occurred:

No gun was needed to feed these six hundred
destitute. Six times the birds circled
the camp, six times landed. At each rising
the flock increased, and at the seventh
swell, the mottled augury took leave
that saints might praises sing
while making way to the Great Salt Lake.

A strong narrative voice runs through the collection. Iris Parker Corry tells a pioneer heroine's story (pp. 26-27) so directly and without sentimentality that poem and subject become one. The stark opening stanza is almost a capsule history of the handcart disaster:

Nellie Unthank
aged ten,
walked, starved, froze
with the Martin Company
and left her parents in shallow graves
near the Sweetwater.

Clinton F. Larson's "Jesse" (pp. 30-31) and "Homestead in Idaho" (pp. 33-38) recount other tragedies. David L. Wright's "The Conscience of the Village" (pp. 51-60) tells of an aging Brother Daniels who saw God and Joseph Smith "one rainy night." Another narrative, "Millie's Mother's Red Dress" (pp. 135-37) by Carol Lynn Pearson, manipulates the reader, but I let it carry me along anyway because we all know Millie's self-sacrificing mother. Compare this poem with May Swenson's "That the Soul May Wax Plump" (p. 280), which shows a master at work on a similar theme.

As one might expect, the lyric voice is also very strong. I like "Fishers" by Robert Rees (pp. 96-99), which captures precious moments between father and son, although the poet comes close to losing his terrific "catch" to sentimentality at the end and may have lost it for some readers. In "Somewhere near Palmyra" (p. 100), Rees effectively uses concrete imagery to lead readers toward an understanding of the Prophet Joseph (ll. 10-21):

personages of fire,
jasper and carnelian,
dispersing the morning dew;
images that bore him
through dark of night
terror of loneliness,
blood of betrayal,
the ache of small graves,
to death from the prison window
where, wings collapsing
through the summer air,
he fell—

"Gilead" (pp. 101-2), also by Rees, is far less successful and near its close offers two lines—"and at once all the trees of the field / clap their hands and rejoice"—that unhappily recall the muse of Joyce Kilmer.

Kathy Evans's "Handwritten Psalm" (p. 171), as delicate as a lyric can be, shows the power of a light, understated touch. Entirely different, "Psalm for a Saturday Night" (p. 94) by Elouise Bell sings like a psalm of David and on one level ironically mirrors the biblical psalmist's self-absorption. But that is just one facet of this well-crafted gem.

Laura Hamblin's "Divorce" (p. 229) has an elliptical feel that is almost oriental. And Richard Tice demonstrates his mastery of the often abused haiku form (p. 213). This one is exceptional:

night rain
against the water, young rice
into the rain

Lance Larsen writes with clarity, vigor, and control and is a keen observer of the telling detail. "Passing the Sacrament at Eastgate Nursing Home" (p. 237) is an outstanding poem on a religious subject. I also like his "Light" (p. 233) and "Dreaming Among Hydrangeas" (p. 235). Other poems I found especially pleasing include Veneta Nielsen's "Nursery Rhyme" (p. 6), Donnell Hunter's "Children of Owl" (p. 69), Vernice Pere's "Heritage" (p. 115), R. A. Christmas's "Self-portrait as Brigham Young" (p. 132), Dixie Partridge's "Learning to Quilt" (p. 150), Clifton Jolley's "Prophet" (p. 167), Mary Blanchard's "Bereft" (p. 198), M. D. Palmer's "Rural Tortillas" (pp. 204-5), Timothy Liu's "Paper Flowers" (p. 248), and many more Other readers are sure to find a lot of poems to like in Harvest. Moreover, the best poems in this collection compare favorably with those of the "first-rate poets" included by the editors. This is an important literary work, a landmark that suggests greater things are yet to come.

Saints Herald, Naomi Russel
Historians record what people do; poets record what people feel. Although Harvest contains some selections of epic proportion covering both events and emotion, most of the poems are based on a single experience or mood (usually somber).

As in many anthologies, there is something for just about everyone interested in literature. Those who are of the Utah faith will identify more closely with the church-oriented features than members of other denominations, but this should not deter other readers.

The Mormon mystique has long made tantalizing copy—especially for the curious cousins who share nineteenth century religious roots. For them this chance to discover what is going on in the minds of contemporary Latter-day Saints ought to encourage perusal of the book. Those who are more interested in form than in faith will find a variety of verse worth exploring. For many years the traditional hymn-text pattern prevailed in Mormon poetry. Today's writers are—according to editor Eugene England—"sympathetic to modern trends in literature and . . . experimentation."

The work of fifty-three poets selected for inclusion in this volume contains variations that are refreshing in both content and style. These Latter-day authors—some serious, some not-so-serious about their religion—provide a gallery of verse that deserves notice. It makes good diversional reading. It also makes a good gift item for poetry lovers.

Ogden Standard Examiner, Janelle Biddinger
The only immediate evidence that the poets in the just-released poetry anthology, "Harvest," have a common heritage or culture is the book's subtitle: "Contemporary Mormon Poems."

The topics are as diverse as the three generations of poets represented. Autumn winds, a Wasatch quake, abandoned lovers, the night sky.

Where's the religious, otherworldly angle you'd expect in literature labeled "Mormon?" It is there, but often only in the flavor of the moment, or the perceptions that shade a musing. "There's a vast array of things to write about in the world, and though the underpinnings and sense of those might be colored by religion, they don't need to be overtly so," said poet Randall Hall of Orem. "That's natural for a poet who is facing the whole world and not just a band of it."

More than 50 of Mormondom's most articulate and elegant poets display their work in what Salt Lake City-based publisher Signature Books calls a "definitive anthology" of 20th century Mormon poetry. But "Harvest" co-editor Dennis Clark, a long-time poetry editor for Sunstone, suspects that readers looking for another "Especially for Mormons," a compilation of inspirational verse and stories, might be surprised, even disapproving. The poems and their themes mesh with our modern, antagonistic world and sit comfortably alongside other contemporary American poets.

"We didn't try to get religious poetry; we felt that would come," said Clark, who spends his working hours as technical services librarian for the Orem City Library. "The poet has a way of filtering his experiences, and that filter will include elements of Mormonism, regardless of what the poet sets out to do."

The LDS Church has long had a tradition of poetry, said Clark, but it's "based on 19th-century conventions." Co-editor Eugene England explains in "Harvest" that it was a tradition born in the writing of hymns and bred in the later "narrative poetry about (LDS) martyred leaders" before maturing into what he describes as the morally instructive literature of the 1880s and beyond.

"Harvest," notes Clark, "is not in that tradition."

Adds Hall, whose poems have appeared in such LDS publications as BYU Studies and Dialogue, "I don't find much triteness in this book. It has transcended that."

Clark said the anthology takes its spirit from the Mormon writers who "broke away from that 19th century tradition of solemnness and started writing poetry that more resembled what the poets of their own time were writing."

That is, pioneering poets such as Clinton Larson, who developed, as England explains, "a poetry of deep but critical faith, able both to attack and affirm the world, Mormon history and Mormon faith." Larson, poet-in-residence at Brigham Young University until his retirement in 1985, has several poems in the book.

This evolution into a more contemporary, but still popularly unaccepted, Mormon poetry form was already largely completed by the time some of the younger poets took up the pen. And said Clark, the shift in emphasis and form and content is not difficult to trace as the anthology chronologically unfolds from the poems of the elder poets to those of the more tender.

"The older poets are more formal and tend to be more concerned with social issues and the group they belong to," said Clark. "They also tend to be a bit more overtly religious." Among the younger writers, however, poetry is "more focused on the individual's perceptions," he said. At the same time, younger poets are returning to what Clark sees as the true heart of poetry: "They are trying more and more to make poetry and oral art."

A poet on the longer-lived end of the anthology's chronology who recognized the art that is inherent in language and who passed on that appreciation to Clark, is his father, Marden J. Clark.

A native of Morgan, the elder Clark (of the Clark family that for many years ran the trucking business there) was lured away from the small town by the World War II effort. He spent the war years designing aircraft in California for Lockheed Corp., returning to BYU as an English professor in the post-war era.

Clark is now several months into a year-long stint teaching English to Chinese students at Qingdao University on the coast of the Yellow Sea.

When asked what it is that draws the elder Clark to poetry (he published in 1978 a collection of poetry, "Moods, Of Late") Dennis Clark answers "trust in language."

"When you write an essay, you have an idea you're driving at. When you're writing a story, you have something to tell. But when it comes to poetry, it's the language that shapes the poem, and he always comes back to that," said Clark.

It was that same fascination with words and rhythms that drew Hall into poetry during his youth in Mantua. Now principal of an LDS Seminary, he says the alliance between poetry and the Scriptures that consume much of his professional life comes easily. In many of his poems, he "project(s) a poetic sense onto my feeling, my insight, of that moment in Scripture.

"It fits nicely, because poetry is trying to express something that at its heart comes as close as you can to things that perhaps are really not possible to express in words."

Others of his poems, though not overtly religious, speak to the spirit in nature. "The Apogee of Loneliness," which appears in the anthology, was conceived during an October afternoon walk around Mantua Reservoir.

"Poetry to me doesn't have to deal with something esoteric or inaccessible, yet it has to stretch things," he said. "Poetry is one of the best ways to express the idea of the spirit being eminent in the world."

Editors Clark and England, who helped found Dialogue in 1966 and now teaches at BYU, "harvested" the collection of poetry from an initial selection of nearly 3,000 pages, said Clark. "What we were looking for was no poetry from any given milieu, but good poetry," he added. Among the contributors are May Swenson, a Utah State University Honorary Doctor of Letters; "Salamander" author Linda Sillitoe; Robert A. Rees, former editor of Dialogue and now with the University of California, Los Angeles; author and playwright Carol Lynn Pearson; Ricks College instructor Donnell Hunter; Arthur Henry King, a British convert and friend of T. S. Eliot; and Karl Sandberg.

Deseret News, Jerry Johnston
Let's begin with this: Poetry anthologies, by nature, never satisfy. Usually several poets admired by an individual reader are left out while lesser lights are included. Even when a reader feels poets have been rightly selected, they're often represented by too many examples, or too few, or all the wrong poems for one's personal taste.

That said, let me say editors Eugene England and Dennis Clark were well aware of the pitfalls of compiling a collection such as this when they began and have shown dedication, literary expertise and high-minded standards in putting together a "worthy" anthology of LDS verse. For the book to have credibility, of course, certain poets must be present. And they're here: Clinton Larson, seen as the father of modem Mormon verse; Edward L. Hart with his hymns of praise; Arthur Henry King's lofty lyrics; populist Carol Lynn Pearson; Marden J. Clark; Veneta Nielsen; Emma Lou Thayne.

And as hoped, there are many, many surprises. Readers who haven't plumbed LDS poetry will be struck, for instance, by the strong poems of Randall L. Hall—poems more forged than written. The feisty side of Robert Christmas puts in an appearance. Personally, I was pleased to discover the straight-talking meditations of Colin B. Douglas, poems that choose honesty over cleverness. What's more, England and Clark wisely included the poems of a dozen or so lesser-known LDS women. In fact, those poems form the backbone of the entire anthology. An old sacrament meeting quip claims men are theologians and the women are Christians in the Mormon Church. The thought is borne out here. Perhaps the evangelical nature of the church prompts many male poets to exhort, to ex-pound, to "proclaim" their poetry. Poem after poem here trades on elevated rhetoric. And the fervor of such poetry tends to produce more heat and light than warmth. So—apart from poems by Douglas and a few others—it falls to several women to offer the precise, "Christian plain style" poetry that's been the heart and soul of religious verse since the Psalms.

It's Penny Allen's "The Word Was Unperfected Till Made Flesh," Laura Hamblin's "Divorce," and "In Celebration of a Daughter" and the simple, conversational voice of truth found in various efforts by Emma Lou Thayne, Carol Lynn Pearson, Dixie Lee Patridge and Mary Lythgoe Bradford that temper the anthology and, in the end, make it a book to be loved as well as respected.

The editors have included the words to several hymns, though not nearly enough, I feel. And more humor could have been showcased without sabotaging the seriousness of the project. But the weakness of the book really lies in the final section. It is an odd addition called "Friends and Relations," featuring the work of famous poets who are either lapsed Mormons and/or "friends of the church." The poems are wonderful, make no mistake. But the only purpose I can see in including the work of William Stafford, May Swenson, Brewster Ghiselin and Leslie Norris is to give the buyer some "name brand" bards--more bang for his buck.

However pure the impulse, the message that England and Clark inadvertently send is this: Our poets are good, but we still need to rub shoulders with high-profile writers to establish credibility. It isn't so much "guilt by association" as "grace by association." And—ironically—it plays right into the very provincial stereotype that Mormon poets and anthologists such as these are trying to undermine.

BYU Today, Richard Cracroft
Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems, an anthology of Mormon poetry edited by Eugene England and Dennis M. Clark, is an important contribution to the ongoing task of identifying and defining excellence in Mormon literature. For you Avid Reader poetry lovers, the volume will be an exciting discovery of how far LDS poets have traveled in shaping a sophisticated poetic rendering of Mormon and human experience. Celestial-, Terrestrial-, Telestial-bounds should own and enjoy this volume (Sons and Daughters of Perdition, should there be any among our readers, will just have to decide for themselves).