in print, is both descendant and ancestor in this literary tradition.

III

To move on to poetry, also full of the Mormon writer's essential gestures. A richly rewarding sampler to put beside Greening Wheat is Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems, edited by (who else?) Eugene England and Dennis Clark, which appeared in 1989 from Signature and opens with poems by Helen Candland Stark, a poet not without honor in her own country, who was Sunstone Symposium's banquet speaker in 1992. Harvest's twin editors have appended a pair of complementary essays to their text"New Tradition," by England, and "New Directions," by Clark, the one a mini-history of poetry among the Latter-day Saints, giving an account of contemporary poets born before 1940, the other a mini-poetics, emphasizing the auditory and linguistic pleasures ofpoetry. In the last thirty years, says England, Mormon poetry has moved away from "the heavily didactic mode" of "Home Literature"the hymns, narratives, and faith-promoting verse which continues in the official literature. The "new tradition" marks a shift from the institutional to the deeply personal. The new poets achieve "an unusually healthy integration of skillful form with significant content . . . . They tend," he says, "to be ironic, intellectually playful, skeptical, self-reflexive . . . . They care deeply about ideas and values" (285-88). England calls Clinton F. Larson's "To a Dying Girl" his finest, a poem I consider a sophisticated illustration of what Marden Clark means by "liberating form" (1-15):

How quickly must she go?
She calls dark swans from mirrors everywhere:
From halls and porticos, from pools