Voices of the Rainbow
Weidman, Bette S.
Life encircling loss VOICES OF THE RAINBOW CONTEMPORARY POETRY BY AMERICAN INDIANS Edited by Kenneth Rosen Seaver Books, $4.95, 232 pp. Bette S. Weidman I think, as I read these poems, of our...
...In "Getting Across," the whole volume's theme of survival is enacted as the boy speaker Hanging out under the bridge by fingertips and a toe between ledge and girder, high over deep water and thinking I can't swim, unreachable by the older boys who've made it across, he watches the steel-blue flash of wings and chestnut bellies of barnswallows shooting and swirling around him...
...With Moon in his bill, Raven flies out, flinging it past his curving wings, far up into the sky...
...The book reminds me of another recent volume of high quality: Soft Day, A Miscellany of Contemporary Irish Writers (University of Notre Dame, 1980...
...Even as presented by translators who are not themselves poets, the work possesses the impact of spontaneous utterance embraced by waiting organic forms...
...Rosen presents a substantial body of work - 200 poems by twenty-one poets, with no one represented by fewer than five poems, some by as many as twenty-four...
...Silko uses the shape of a long line divided by spacing in some poems...
...Raven's eyes lock tight in her skull...
...The pronoun in her "Indian Song: Survival" is mysterious...
...they respect and newly burnish its bright motives...
...The portrait of a woman in "Raising the Flag" is amazing for its turn on an image of Indian heroism, drowned in despair, reborn in dream, this time in a woman, grandmother, a figure of survival and solidarity in many of the poems in the book...
...Many of Revard's poems have this cross-over shape, dramatizing an exchange: the speaker meets four quail on the way to get the unfunny Sunday funnies...
...Readers who know something of the traditional poetry double-translated from Indian languages and from the oral tradition to the print medium (see The Sky Clears, edited by A. Grove Day, University of Nebraska, 1951, for a fair sampling), already have experienced the quality of surprise in this literature, its forth-rightness, the unexpected downright images...
...the "I" is identified with people fleeing north, with hummingbird, wind, deer...
...How much we need this kind of work, the bringing into contemporary poetry the world of plot and image in Indian oral literature...
...In the last poem in the book, "The Way the Bird Sat," Ray A. Young Bear draws an image from nature and imagines its coalescence with the dream-images of his tradition: the way the bird sat dividing the weather through songs cleaning the snow and rain from the underside of its wings was evidence...
...Phil George expresses their justified pride in his "Morning Vigil": "We endure./We sing...
...The forthrightness of the twenty-one contemporary poets represented in Voices comes directly out of this tradition, well known to each of them...
...They fill the sky with shimmering yellow wind and I see them with the clarity of ice shattered in mountain streams where each pebble is speckled and marbled alive beneath the water...
...This arrangement makes it possible to hear each poet's individual voice, yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts...
...into a biographical list that includes training greyhounds, learning local creeks and begetting four children...
...To those who complain of reading translations, let me simply say that English takes to these stories...
...They are challenged by their tradition...
...without a winter coat she was two hundred and seventy years anishinabe time she learned english in a cold place for sacred names milking cows for another race her brown feet breaking through her red charity shoes squaw for the soldiers who brought her another drink white city soldiers cursing her dark eyes mauling her breasts for the cavalry without a name she was down in a civilization she never understood living forever when the new soldiers fell one by one at the bar she raised in her heart the sacred flag of the people dreaming her children were coming home Another good poet, Carter Revard, slips his Rhodes Scholarship and Yale Ph.D...
...In several poems her interest lies in capturing seasonal detail with the directness of traditional Indian poetry and the close-up movement of a cinematic image: The morning sun . coming unstuffed with yellow light butterflies tumbling loose and blowing across the Earth...
...This strongly imagined sense of continuity is expressed in many of the poems in the book, reminding its reader of the same theme in Whitman, life encircling loss, mysteriously reviving...
...How I pity them for missing the voices of the rainbow and marvel at the tenacity and richness of the oral tradition, still here for us...
...Raven listens, whistling in stunted trees...
...makes it past his vision of death, hand over hand, to the other side of the daredevil bridge, settling like the barnswallow into safety...
...But Voices of the Rainbow is full of songs of power by singers, we are rewarded to see, who are not solitary...
...In Anita Endrezze-Probst's wonderful poem, a fisherman's daughter, keeper of the moon and its light, is impregnated by Raven: Medicine stones speak in smooth wind-rounded words...
...they are joined in the joyous work of claiming and passing on a magnificent literary heritage...
...His magic is quiet, sly...
...This quality is so pervasive across the work of many different translators that one knows, even as a non-speaker of Indian languages, that it is a quality of the original (Frederick W. Turner makes a similar point in his introduction to Virginia Armstrong's volume of Indian speeches, I Have Spoken, Swallow Press, 1971...
...From among the berry thicket, a spiraling leaf blesses her tongue...
...the speaker meets redneck Billy Don...
...In the work of Gerald Vizenor, idyllic landscape is exchanged for urban realities, as in "Unhappy Diary Days": she burned love letters from a felon counted her shares her travels unhappy diary days she turned her clothes sleeve by sleeve across the seasons next year unhooking the hooks untying the ties she undressed for the garden in the moist September light she lifted her breasts hand over hand in flight with young birds turning on the wrong trees at dusk she crashed through the glass Vizenor writes spare, unsparing poems, finding a bridge between his own tradition and Japanese haiku...
...Phil George expresses their justified pride in his "Morning Vigil": "We endure./We sing...
...Just as Whitman lay with his soul one summer morning, perhaps it is the spirit of survival with which the Indian speaker lies in winter: You lie beside me in the sunlight warmth around us and you ask me if I still smell winter...
...on the contrary, the languages of such literature should be taught to Indians and others, but I am stunned by the fertilizing power of the myths for contemporary poetry...
...When the child is born, his nose is beaked...
...Poets may find there (1) models of organic form to support and teach writers of free verse and (2) rich subject matter in image and plot of traditional tales and poems...
...Indian poets and perhaps others who find them irresistible will learn to tell them in our supple tongue...
...the bird who had tunneled through the daylight creating lines in the air for the people in his dreams to follow...
...This is no argument against the use of Indian languages...
...Bette S. Weidman I think, as I read these poems, of our nineteenth-century prose writers, who complained of the short supply of ruins in imaginatively barren, light-of-day America...
...Despite the common source, each poet's voice is unique There is room here for comment and quotation of only a few...
...First published in 1975, this anthology is newly out in a paperback edition, beautifully illustrated with drawings by R. C. Gorman and Aaron Yava...
...Like black water, Night falls into her hands spilling into the corners of her lodge...
...the capacity for elevated utterance and striking imagery belongs, not to the translators, but to the chiefs who spoke...
...In the village, the fisherman's daughter buries the empty Moon boxes deep inside her...
...A large body of translated Indian poetry and prose is published, an even larger body waits to be read in early records, and there remains the strongest and safest source, living Indian memory...
...She entertains her child with "the milky sphere," and the baby completes his transformation: When he cries, pointing to the boarded smoke hole, she opens it...
...Her son sings, pulling feathers from under his skin, shaking out wings, blue-black, strong...
...At their birth, she dies...
...some are involved in painting, crafts or other arts...
...Revard's line breaks are unerring here, the crossing of boy and swallow creating a truly organic form...
...They rub like sandstone against her palms...
...The seven women and fourteen men anthologized here in English come from twenty different tribal affiliations...
...Like the Irish writers, these Americans have a cultural identity, a powerful folklore, a set of traditional forms, a heritage of imaginative vigor...
...Perhaps the most beautiful poem in the book is the two-part retelling of a Northwest coast legend, "Raven/Moon," by Anita Endrezze-Probst...
...A surprising number teach Indian cultures and writing...
...Could we not, like the Irish, learn to write poems in English that rise from our rich and neglected heritage...
...Nestled in her womb, it grows...
...gathered in places as diverse as Oxford, Laguna and Vietnam, not just to leave home but to reconnect with a living culture...
...Set adrift in cold waters, under a blanket of Red Moons, her body is guarded by whispering gulls...
...Moon settles slowly, an embryo in Night Maiden's belly...
...in "Toc' osh" she tells a Laguna coyote story in prose divided into line lengths to keep it compact, memorable, thinning the distinction between poetry and prose narrative...
...All are well educated and have used their educations...
...The book offers proof of the vitality of traditional Indian cultures as two-fold source for contemporary poetry...
...Mountain forest wind travels east and I answer: taste me, I am the wind touch me, I am the lean gray deer running on the edge of the rainbow...
...the speaker meets a two-year-old in falling leaves...
...Leslie Marmon Silko chooses identification with a mythic figure (fog woman) and invokes the smell and color of landscape...
Vol. 109 • April 1982 • No. 8
