BIBLIOFILE
Turning Sixty
by Gary Miranda
(Zoland Books, 73 pages, $13)

Turning Sixty is Portlander Gary Miranda's first book of poetry since 1983's Grace Period. He stopped writing in 1982 at the birth of his son and has only recently taken up his pen again. The appropriate title comes from the fact that this book of 60 poems is a present to himself on his 60th birthday.

Reminiscent of Jacques Prevert's To Paint a Picture of a Bird, Miranda's villanelle "Directions into the Poems" opens the book, giving us delightful pointers on how to approach his work.

The section titled "Of Foreign Lands and Peoples" contains a half-dozen very interesting poems placed in Greece. Two that struck me are "Yannis Ritsos on the Island of Samos" and "Cockroach"--the first because Ritsos is one of my favorite poets, the second because of the repulsive nature of the insect in question. That notwithstanding, the latter poem is a superb invitation to pause and consider war's inevitably horrible results. The poet sprays a bug that refuses to die; cursing his inability to squash the creature, he begins to consider a memorial for the Greek war dead, wondering if they died--in a scene worthy of Kafka--like the bug, fatally gassed, refusing to give up, legs thrashing. In the poem's powerful conclusion, we see "Andromache/weeping for Hector/dragged over rough ground like a plow/face down."

Miranda says that compiling this book has been the source of much joy--and it's a gift he's passed along to us. As I read and enjoy this collection, I'm glad Miranda has broken 18 years of silence to return to poetry. Carlos Reyes

Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema
by Barbara Wilinsky
(University of Minnesota Press, 178 pages, $18.95)

There are two popular conceptions surrounding art films. First, that the postwar boom in popularity occurred because foreign films were more likely to feature gratuitous nudity, and second, that if a film doesn't succeed in New York, it won't travel. These ideas are dealt with, but not satisfactorily, in Sure Seaters, Barbara Wilinsky's book on the rise of art house cinema in America.

Filled with the kind of academic prose that makes casual reading fruitless, Sure Seaters raises more questions than it answers. For example, why did certain films that would be considered obscure today (such as Bergman's and Godard's) enter into the public consciousness? Wilinsky is silent.

In its detailing of the economic realities of how art houses function, Wilinsky's book points out that the art house circuit hasn't changed much over the years. Word of mouth remains its main advertiser, and New York still has more art houses than the rest of the country, which makes it the nation's natural testing ground.

But Wilinsky maintains that the postwar success of art houses was due primarily to the fact that the value of intelligence in the lower and middle classes increased courtesy of the G.I. Bill, which allowed the average American veteran an entree into academia. Subsequently, value was placed on more intelligent art.

Yet the fact remains that, quite often, films that were successful in art houses appealed to more American sensibilities (Kurosawa over Ozu) or were sold as borderline pornographic (the Bardot oeuvre), all delivered in a setting that promised elitism. Damon Houx

Death of a River Guide
by Richard Flanagan
(Grove Press, 326 pages, $24)

Richard Flanagan will read at Twenty-Third Avenue Books, 1015 NW 23rd Ave., 224-6203. 7:30 pm Wednesday, April 11.

With language as lush and textured as the riparian landscape it evokes, Richard Flanagan's Death of a River Guide is a stunning, layered excursion through the past.

Aljaz Cosini is a river guide leading a group of eco-tourists down Tasmania's Franklin River, when one of his "punters" falls overboard. Sacrificing his own safety (and perhaps his life), Aljaz dives in to rescue him. Trapped and thrashing below the rushing river, Aljaz is granted sweeping, cinematic visions of not only his own troubled and tragic past, but of the secret inner lives of his multicultural predecessors as well.

Through the stories and myths revealed to him, a vivid, complex picture of Tasmania itself slowly emerges alongside Aljaz's family history. With wit and grace, the proud struggle of aborigines facing displacement and immigrant settlers carving out a place for themselves in the wildest of landscapes is juxtaposed with the irony of displaced modern-day city dwellers floating through the same dense forest canopies as if through an amusing museum exhibit. As he struggles under the rush of the Franklin, Aljaz's visions become increasingly revelatory, increasingly insightful. And while he hopes for rescue, he prepares himself for death.

Flanagan, himself a former river guide, makes both the sumptuous natural world of Tasmania and the rich lives of its people blossom on the page with beauty, grace and razor-sharp precision. For its unique and unfamiliar setting, for its thoughtful examinations of expansive themes from white cultural imperialism to wanton destruction of the natural world, and, most importantly, for Flanagan's gift of language, Death of a River Guide is a journey well worth taking. Drew Cherry