the traumas of mortality, as a tightly woven fence encircling the fearsome thickets of the unconscious mind" (vii-x).

The Mormon past, of course, continues to receive more celebration than troubled examination in popular historical narratives which trumpet Mormon manifest destiny, as in Gerald N. Lund's on-going sequence The Work and the Glory, which follows the fortunes of the Steed family from the founding years onward. And, in what we may still identify as Mormon Country7 despite a growing international LDS profile, backward glances have produced a distinctive regional literature, on the whole realistic yet genteel and reminiscent of the local colorists of the late 19th centuryexcept for the powerful symbolic naturalism of Douglas Thayer's fully imagined characters and events in stories like "The Red-Tailed Hawk" and Levi Peterson's NightSoil, which cultivates his Mormon version of God's Little Acre in the manner of the southern naturalists, complete with local grotesques.

In his essays "The Poetics of Provincialism" and "Imagining Mormon Country" Ed Geary examines this literature and exemplifies it himself in his classic Goodbye to Poplarhaven: Recollections of a Utah Boyhood, which shares a kinship with other notable regional remembrances: Wayne Carver's "A Child's Christmas in Utah" and Plain City: Portrait of a Mormon Village, Don Marshall's Rummage Sale and Frost in the Orchard, Sam Taylor's Family Kingdom, Rodello Hunter's A House of Many Rooms, Virginia Sorensen's Where Nothing Is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood, David L. Wright's River Saints (in verse), and Douglas Thayer's Under the Cottonwoods. Such stories resemble Willa Cather's celebration of her