Beyond heart mountain /

Many poets have sought to reconcile war's irreversible alteration of the normal course of human lives and memories. In this debut narrative triptych, selected by Ishmael Reed for the National Poetry Series, Roripaugh manages to bring a history she never experienced through her own past, to her present self. The first section is written from the perspective of a young Vietnam-era girl trying to piece together a multiple identity from within a small Wyoming town. The icons of her Japanese heritageÄdolls, bells, music, and foodÄare a source of pride and confusion: "I'm half-and-half, and I hide/ in the house, listen to my parents'/ music. Outside on the pavement/ a tsuzumi drum, accompanied by suzu,/ temple bells, coming from their/ bedroomÄthe chime on my father's/ typewriter." The second section, "Heart Mountain, 1943," tells the stories of 10 Japanese prisoners held at the Heart Mountain internment camp, weaving together polyvocal narrative fragments that talk to the reader (and each other) across the stark walls of the cell blocks. Part three of the book includes poems told from the perspective of an older and self-assured woman who has embraced the cultural contrasts of her complicated ancestry, and can now separate the shadow of war from her own psychic and personal growth: "...leaf prints etched in black mold, like/ the pattern of/ a kimono found burned into/ a woman after/ Hiroshima, and it is almost/ too beautiful, / too horrible for me to bear." Such images may not, finally, reconcile war and grief with aesthetics, but the book's drive toward clarity and strength is often moving. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Ishmael Reed's choice for this year's "National Poetry" series is easy to like: a first collection born, like its author, from the union of a United States military man and a Japanese woman during World War II. Roripaugh, who is also a pianist with a performance degree from Indiana University, convincingly re-creates her mother's war-bound world in clear, concise free verse, fusing classical Japanese poetic imageryÄchrysanthemums, the moon, kimono sleevesÄwith the violence of war, occupation, and internment in the United States: "She says/ oysters make them, when there's/ sand or gravel under their shells./ It hurts. And the more it hurts/ the bigger the pearl." American racism and cruelty is detailed in "Heart Mountain, 1943," a long first-person narrative about an internment camp; in the prose poem "Chrysanthemums," the poet's mother recounts childhood koto lessons cut short by war. Other narrators are ghosts, or spirit-lovers, a classical Japanese conceit that resonates in light of recent history. But most of all these are the poems of a girl in the land-locked American West, where an Asian American may be treated only slightly better than a Native American, and squid in a sink smells like a lost country. This is a fine first collection.ÄEllen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Ishmael Reed, a champion of multiculturalism in the arts, selected this first book by Wyoming-born Roripaugh for the National Poetry Series. She's the daughter of an American GI and his Japanese war-bride, who, we learn in a number of poems, never fully adjusted to life on the prairie. Full of undefined Japanese terms, Roripaugh's mostly plain verse dwells on questions of identity: ""I'm half-and-half, and I hide / in the house . . . ."" Though ""Pearls"" ends with her mother's lesson in enduring prejudice, Roripaugh elsewhere avoids the rhetoric of victimization. She feels guilty for rejecting an Indian girl at school (despite her present claim of solidarity) and identifies with a Hiroshima survivor who's had lots of reconstructive surgery. Cross-cultural misunderstanding obtains, but she celebrates the great food: squid, with its smell of ""another country""; sushi, to which she delivers an ode. A handful of poems wonderfully evoke her times hunting and dressing antelope with her father. A ten-poem sequence in the voices of Japanese-Americans detained in internment camps gives a glimpse into their daily lives, from the fisherman whose boat was confiscated to the old man who nurtures homed toads. A young girl worries for her boyfriend, whose draft resistance leads to a harsher camp; he later explains his refusal to serve in terms of American betrayal. Roripaugh changes tone for a group of poems that embody an Asiatic sensibility, full of colors and paper lanterns, Buddhistic in their enigmatic meanings. A few poems about the metamorphoses of fish and flowers into human forms stand out for their simple drama. A solid, if sometimes predictable, debut. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.