PLACES IN THE HEART: POETS WRITE ABOUT 'HOME' - SOME SWEET, SOME NOT
By Richard Wakefield
Special to the Seattle Times

Of the many gains and losses this tumltuous century has brought, perhaps none has been as disorienting as our unprecedented freedom of movement - a gain, yes, but a loss, too, of our sense of place, which is in turn part of our sense of self. Lee Ann Roripaugh's Beyond Heart Mountain delves into the inner lives of people uprooted not by choice byt by force. Heart Mountain, an internment camp for Japanese Americans, becomes their home for the duration of World War II. Home? The human spirit can adapt to a great deal, but not without ambivalence.

Each of the sections of the title poem is in the voice of a different character. Nina Inoue, a young girl, recalls her piano lessons in the camp, the recital she gave there, even the details of the mail-order dress she wore for her performance. But she recalls, too, the humiliation of using a latrine without partitions. People show their consideration by pretending not to notice: " . . . everyone made their eyes glassy / like they didn't recognize anybody." She understands eventually how small kindnesses make life bearable even - especially? - in the harshest places.

Older people bring to their camp life the vivid memories of another world. Masa Nakahara thinks of the miniature deer that lived in a park near a temple in Japan; that other remembered place becomes a refuge during blackout tests, when even the forsaken, dusty landscape of their camp is obliterated. Yet her son, an interpreter or the U.S. Army, is at war with the country that is home to her trasured memory.

Throughout Beyond Heart Mountain, Roripaugh shows that poetry can meld such seemingly irreconcilable places into a new place all its own, a place not shown on any map but no less real for that.