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.
From Publishers Weekly
"The leap between the sacred and profane is as thin as fishing line." In her seventh book, Harjo (Secrets from the Center of the World), a member of the Creek tribe, makes this leap time after time. Working with a diction and a syntax that seem deliberately plain and declarative, she invokes ancient Native American myth, often from the midst of ordinary contemporary places such as Brooklyn, N.Y.; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago's O'Hare airport ("Chicago rose up as a mechanical giant with soft insides buzzing"). Her myths endow everyday experience with a transformative meaning that rescues Harjo's characters from their sometimes isolating individuality. Yet the myths also heed the details of individual experience as "the single complicated human becomes a wave of humanness." The warmth of her universalizing gift is inclusive, collecting the lives of taxi drivers, an infant granddaughter, and "an Apache man who is passing by my table in a restaurant." Readers may likewise feel swept up in the gentle wave of Harjo's poetry and prose poetry, where "every day is a reenactment of the creation story."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.