Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer, once told a BYU crowd that he saw himself as a poet first and a prose writer second, but the world had turned the tables on him.
Reading "Crazy for Living," my guess is Linda Sillitoe knows the feeling.Sillitoe is a versatile writer with strong publishing credentials in short stories, novels, journalism, essays and poetry. One gets the impression that - when an event or insight strikes her - some internal sorting machine kicks it toward the proper genre. Leslie Norris and Margaret Atwood work that way. It's even said Joyce Carol Oates used to keep several different typewriters around the house for different genres.
Lucky for us, Sillitoe saves her passions for poetry.
"Crazy for Living" has a random feel. This is not a poet working out a scheme. The poems are freely organized around three headings, "Journalist," "Journeys in Tandem," "Journeys Between." But they are arbitrary categories. Sillitoe is not a career poet. She simply sings in verse when that particular muse taps her shoulder.
Still, if the book feels a bit tossed together, the upside is Sillitoe only turns to poetry when her feelings are too strong and personal to fit elsewhere. And that gives "Crazy for Living" a uniform strength and power.
The best poems - to my mind and ear - are in the "Journeys Between" section. This is LDS "frontier writing" at its best - the frontier being the no-woman's-land between Anglo and American Indian cultures, secular politics and religious conviction, between duty and desire.
"What is more real . . . the homeland or the journey," the poet asks in one poem. "What is more real . . . the live eagle we passed / or the eagles you described who mated in flight?"
This is a book of unresolved tensions, conflicts and questions. Sillitoe isn't out to supply answers, she's out to define the questions. And that makes this collection more than just interesting; it makes it important.