The Woman Who Fell from the Sky : Poems by Joy Harjo

Amazon.com
Along with N. Scott Momaday, John Trudell, and very few others, Joy Harjo is an essential Native American literary voice. She counts among her devoted readers Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, and Sandra Cisneros; her writing is infused with a generosity of spirit that accounts for much of her appeal. Dancing children, the attempt to heal a broken life, rising moons, and blue horses turning into streaks of lightning are the images Harjo uses to spin her yarns, and her words are spellbinding. Her talent is manifest in "A Postcolonial Tale": "Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff." And in "Wolf Warrior": "A white butterfly speckled with pollen joined me in my prayers yesterday as I thought of you in Washington." There is a lot of magic and a lot of hope woven through the dark backdrop of the poems in The Woman Who Fell from the Sky. Harjo is a treasure.

If Whitman were a Muskogee jazzman, he would have written this. In her fourth book, Harjo fulfills her earlier promise in a stunning, mature, wholehearted, musical series of poems. The title poem, based on an Iroquoian myth of the falling creatrix, is typical of the transformations she works: the goddess becomes a "strange beauty in heels" who falls through a plateglass grocery window and is aided and redeemed by a lost Indian named Saint Coincidence, whom she in turn redeems. In another lush narrative, an Indian veteran vouchsafes his tale of redemption of the spirit who is "never a stranger but a relative he'd never met." Harjo melds the present with the mythic past, seeing through time and space into a timeless, spacious abode of spirit. Short explanatory notes serve like the patter at a poetry reading, placing each poem in its philosophical and temporal context in this brilliant, unforgettable book.

Table of Poems

The Creation Story
The Dawn Appears With Butterflies
The Field Of Miracles
Fishing
The Flood
Insomnia And The Seven Steps To Grace
Letter From The End Of The Twentieth Century
Mourning Song
The Myth Of Blackbirds
The Naming
Northern Lights
The Other Side Of Yellow To Blue
Perhaps The World Ends Here
Petroglyph
The Place The Musician Became A Bear
A Postcolonial Tale
Promise
Promise Of Blue Horses
Sonata For The Invisible
The Song Of The House In The House
Who Invented Death And Crows And Is There Anything We Can Do
Witness
Wolf Warrior

 

 

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