Earthworks – serie

The Effigies series has woven a vibrant tapestry of indigenous poets from Native North America and the Pacific. As the third in this series, this anthology continues this weaving with the work of four emerging Pacific islander women poets from Guam, Hawai’i, and Fiji. Despite their distant origins, all these writers explore culture, history, politics, genealogy, feminism, and the environment. They each have their own unique style, ranging from the lyric to the avant-garde. Overall, they represent the next resurgent wave of empowered and decolonial Pacific writers.No‘u Revilla (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi), Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi), Kisha Borja-Quichocho-Calvo (Chamoru), and Tagi Quolouvaki (Fijian, Tongan) take readers into the vast Pacific ocean to swim beyond the reef in high tide, out to where the water meets the sky, only to circle back to the islands to taste the tears and sweat in coconut and guava, the smell of frangipani on the wind. Amidst such beauty, these poets also carry us into darkness with tremendous power and vulnerability, laying bare the ravages of colonialism—the brutal occupation of country, the violence waged against Native women and girls, the erosion of language and ancestral memory, and the forced disconnections from land, ocean, and other healing lifeways. Effigies III features four debut books that fearlessly journey through these home-islands in ways that will transform and empower.

Shortlisted for The Minnesota Book Awards 2006Poems in The Mother’s Tongue move in images of the living world that include plants and creatures both native and non-native to American landscapes. These poems move via persona and personal lyric through expressions of ambivalence about choosing the life of the body – of womanhood and motherhood – through the strange realm of pregnancy into the netherworld of the post-partum period and out into the world again, into the enlarged world, the world at war, the world of work and words. Finally these poems move to enter the world of women as transformed within the love of language – of recovered Ojibwe language and English renewed as first language in the mouths of infants. These are poems that urge women to discover the power of their own tongues as they teach speech – the sweet, salty, sour and bitter desires – the taste on the mother’s tongue.

Winner Of The 2006 Oklahoma Book Awards Evidence of Red: Prose and Poems rails against lost lands and lovers, heralds death and mad warriors, and celebrates a doomed love affair between Hollywood’s invented characters: “Noble Savage” and “Indian Sports Mascot.” The author, a Choctaw Indian from Oklahoma writes about modern life in America, as well as the strange and humorous encounters she’s had with Arabs in Syria, and Jews in Israel. She writes of growing up in a family of native storytellers who tell of their lives and experiences.

Revard’s poems are more like those of Seamus Heaney than those of Paul Muldoon – more like Robert Frost than Wallace Stevens, more like Mark Twain than Henry James. They are true stories, some from time on the Osage Reservation during Dust Bowl days, some from the Isle of Skye in Hippie Time, others from Creation Time in Las Vegas with Trickster, at the Hotel Empire in Manhattan with Dante, under dragons flying over St. Louis, dodging bullets while stealing watermelons, listening to humpbacked whales and wine-throated hummingbirds in Bellagio, parading with the Veterans of Foreign Wars to publicize some powwow in the old Indian-fighter headquarters at Jefferson Barracks on the Mississippi, sitting with Ponca cousins in a bar and hoping not to get shot after the occupation of Wounded Knee. The reason for every poem in this marvellous selection is to invite readers into its personal, familial, communal space to feast with the Ponca people and Revard on whatever they have on the table. These poems are all for having some kind of good time together, and the more the merrier.

Written from a contemporary Cherokee, Queer, and mixed-race experience, Walking with Ghosts: Poems confronts the legacy of land-theft, genocide, and forced removal of Cherokees from their homelands while simultaneously resisting ongoing attacks on both Indigenous and Gay/ Lesbian/ Bisexual /Transgender (GLBT) communities. The debut work of Qwo-Li Driskill, a young Cherokee poet also of African, Irish, Lenape, Lumbee, and Osage ancestries, these poems move across Cherokee history. From the infamous Trail of Tears and the Allotment Act to the Indian boarding school system and contemporary manifestations of racism, these poems reach into Cherokee collective memory asking its readers to not only remember the history of colonization, but also the survival and continuance of Indigenous Nations. With this collection Driskill, who identifies as Queer as well as Two-Spirit (a contemporary term used in North American Indigenous communities to describe diverse sexual and gender identities) becomes one of only a few of American Indian Queer/Two-Spirit male writers in print. Refusing to compromise identities, Driskill also grapples with the impact of hate crimes on GLBT communities, multiracial and multi-tribal identity, the AIDS crisis, psychic trauma, and war. Yet the poems in this collection are rooted in a sense of love and the power of words to heal the legacies of colonization and other forms of violence. Cherokee love poems weave into eulogies to the dead while ghosts draw the living into a place of wholeness. Tender, startling, confrontational and erotic, this book honors the dead and brings the survivors back home.

Blood Run was once a great mound city. About eighty remnants of its original four-hundred mounds still stand in testament to the 10,000 people who made their home here time ago and prove a terrific tribute of world history for their descendants living just down the road today. Yet, Blood Run is still in great danger of being forever destroyed by looters, developers, and the plow. This volume stands to persuade others to protect her and the sacred remains she guards in mounded tombs. The verse play of persona poems herein emanate its character of architectural accomplishment designed in accordance with the sun and moon and multitudes of stars above.Previous to European colonization and conquest efforts, trade flourished between Indigenous peoples of the Americas for perhaps as long as time earmarked humankind. Evidence of continual vast trade throughout the Western Hemisphere, including art, symbolic items, and practical tools, was well cached in the multitude of mound cities puckering vast portions of the continent, some still incredibly existing after decades of continual and intentional desecration, disfigurement, and dismantling by grave robbers and Manifest Destiny driven anti-eco agriculturalists. Though surely there were times of dilemma for Indigenous Americans, these long-developed relations ensured survival during eras of doubt. Thus the likelihood of peace prevailed and most nations enjoyed the security of blanket protection, aid, and assistance from related tribes; whether by blood or adoption. In so much, tribes that enjoyed helping one another sustain themselves engaged in trade relationships with numerous additional nations outside these pacts; building cities of ceremonial, burial, effigy, and civic mounds, wherein which they flourished.

Native Writers Circle Of The Americas First Book Award For Poetry These poems rise from the smoke of a Council Fire. Around the fire gather many nations of the world, some angry, some at peace. The nations’ emissaries accept invitations to stand together at the Fork-in-the-Road Indian Poetry Store and turn rhythmically to the four cardinal directions, so that the earth can regain its balance. Facing East, the ambassadors see Flags of Mercy hanging over New York City and Nagasaki, then encounter and embrace a manic-depressive Native Hawaiian-Cherokee medicine man in Oklahoma City. Traveling closer to the moon and stars they fly with a dreamer in the Garden of the Bumblebees, and they listen in Weleetka, Oklahoma, to the last two living speakers of Yuchi. Turning North, the councilors ice skate with post-Vietnam revolutionaries on glacier lakes in Idaho. They chase grouse in snow two feet deep, ponder dormancy in hyphenated winters and university libraries, and learn the best way to build a fall fire. Facing West, they lie on cool, creek bed vulvas of earth in sweltering Great Plains summer, navigate a wilderness river in canoes, and kiss a lover at dawn in the Chihuahan desert. Finally, turning in the divine direction South, the emissaries hear The Story of The Seeds, a journey back to 1540, to the conquest of Mabila by De Soto. In a stream of survival, they emigrate with Choctaws on trails of tears from Mississippi to Oklahoma, before sharing big ripe melons in the delta of the Vegetable River. They finish their revolution facing east again, just before dawn.

Native American men and women who wound up in Vietnam were very different from traditional warriors. Many had been removed from that traditional culture as many of these warrior traditions had been removed from these new societies and the old traditions had been replaced by Christian practices of various types. The sacred preparations were no longer practiced and the warriors left vulnerable and lacking pertinent knowledge. They were also lacking the homecoming ceremonies. These ceremonies would take place after the warrior was kept from the main camp for four days. In those four days they would fast and purify themselves. Once they returned to the village the warrior was given the opportunity to tell his story in a healing ceremony. His immediate family would be near, or surrounding him. Around them would be the next level of family. Around them would be the remainder of the tribe. Everyone would listen, and remember. That was their duty to him, to listen, and to remember. Each warrior was given this opportunity.After this ceremony it was understood that this person was now different and would be treated so from then on. This “different” person was now accepted as having been permanently changed. What had happened to him would never go away. His people knew this and they would never go away either. The relationship was understood and bound.The Vietnam “warriors” were afforded none of these opportunities. They were essentially on their own. For example, when I returned, my unit landed at McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma, Washington at midnight in the winter of 1972, and released for leave; Sprung upon The World. My sister picked me up at the base and we went to downtown Tacoma and had a pizza and a several beers before going to her home. A cousin-by-marriage, whom I had met and served with In-country, was with us. We stayed with my sister for a few days and eventually I went home to Sitka to complete my 45 days leave. My cousin left for his home in Canada at the same time.This story is repeated over and over again by most everyone that I had a chance to talk, or listen to. In many of these cases, the Vietnam Vet was released and sent home to resentment and hostility. He was not listened to and what ever was expressed was not heard. Many went home on drinking binges that started on the plane or as soon as they were off the plane. No comfort given, not a friendly ear was to be found. At most American Legion Posts beer was free for a while, but after it was determined “these new guys” were really different, the free drinks stopped. What little comfort was given was soon withdrawn.Soon, the prisons began to fill up with the “new guys”. Violence had become the major expression of this generation of warriors. So many of these new guys were dead, or in prison, not long after their arrival “home”. It was, and still is, a national tragedy.

In Cheryl Savageau’s new book of poetry, Mother/Land, she radically re-maps New England as Native American space. Savageau retells and re-imagines creation stories, revealing a landscape of trees, ponds, rivers and mountains rich in meaning for Abenaki people, and weaves traditional, personal and family stories, with stories of colonization and resistance. Savageau’s “unhistory” tells the stories of her people without privileging the moment of contact with Europe as the defining moment for viewing the culture.Mother/Land is beaded with gems from her mother’s jewel box—poems that tell stories of her mother’s life, and the complexities of survival and love in a family of mixed heritage.Savageau’s work signals the reemergence of a people who have been described as “hiding in plain sight.” In contrast to stereotypical associations of Native Americans with “Mother Earth,” this poetry highlights the bittersweet complexities of the relationship between a woman and her homeland, whose bodies seem to be constantly under siege.

A dead bridge. A dead theory. The Bering Strait theory, dead to Native peoples, whose hundreds of creation accounts dispel those of anthropologists. This new collection by Mohawk poet, James Thomas Stevens, was written after a trip to China in 2002. After visiting the Catholic Xujiahui cathedral across from his hotel, he began research on Jesuit interactions with Asia. What he encountered there in the cathedral and in museums in Shanghai, was reminiscent of the history of Jesuits in his home in Iroquoia, especially in the Mohawk homelands along the Saint Lawrence River. The first poem in the collection, (dis)Orient, addresses issues of charting and mapping, as well as issues of authority. It leads to short poems written in and about China, then on to the central poem, The Mutual Life, a poem of post-colonial and personal emergencies – a poem of healing, as well, based on a 1901 book of accidents, emergencies and illnesses published by the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. The poems proceeding are poems written in and about Iroquoia.They are followed by my most recent undertaking, Alphabets of Letters, which explores the propaganda found in Native American children's primers from the time of our honored Mohawk chief, Joseph Brant, and the propaganda of rhetoric in general. This poem explores the rhetoric of empire and the short distance our world has moved toward understanding and communication in these past few centuries.

Apprenticed to Justice is a collection of vividly rendered lyrical and narrative poems that trace the complex inheritances of Indigenous America, this “strange map drawn of blood and history.” It opens with intriguing glimpses of individuals—a mother “born of dawn / in a reckless moon of miscegenation,” cousins “who rotated authority / on marbles sex and skunk etiquette,” women “planting dreams with dank names like rutabaga and kohlrabi”—and it turns on the notion of legacy. From what dark turmoil of earth do we emerge? How and what do we inherit? To what mesh of tangled origins do we live apprenticed? These are the literal and the metaphorical questions Anishinaabe author Kimberly Blaeser asks in this, her third collection of poetry.Grounded in rich details of places from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to the arctic region of Kirkenes, Norway, the poems link the people and the landscapes through storytelling. Narratives range from the comedy of a missing outhouse floor to the longing for the return of an MIA. The storied landscapes of the poems, the “Rocky bottom allotted land(s) / twenty-eight slow horse miles / from the village store,” also become intertwined with tribal history. And the remembered tribal accounts of scorched earth campaigns or the Trail of Tears in their turn become enmeshed with contemporary justice issues including Potlatch’s relentless clear cutting of forest lands and the strange cannibalism inherent in Sr. Inez Hilger’s study of “other” cultures like that at Blaeser’s home, White Earth Reservation. Ultimately, attention to these justice issues invoke the lives of tribal elders whose figurative “fragile houses / pegged at the corners with only hope” somehow represent and teach survival. Finally, each movement in the book connects back to the act of writing, to the poems themselves as both remembrance and a kind of revolution—“these fingers / drumming on keys.”

This is a poetically charged work of autobiographical retrospection, speculative memory and an artistic alternative to common constructions of identity. The influences include traditional songs, ceremonial undercurrents, dream vehicles, disparate landscapes, chemical vapors, relative longings and belief in the possibility of healing again and again even after death. Some works herein are water-source clear, some are abstract meditative breaths, some are ironic dialogues with memorial humor and some are attempts to tease characters out into the open. This collection is held together by relatives, fragments, an undeniable belief in the creative force of even the slightest wisp of memory.

It is a rare pleasure to unleash beauty upon the ever-tragic world, an exception to the plagued misfortune of greed, despair, and injury. Though elements of colonization do present certain challenges and malady to a natural world inhabited for tens of thousands of years by peoples steeped in ideologies, practical and philosophic systems, they do not overcome the lingual sensibilities and prowess of the poets representing the areas of the planet present in this text. Instead the poets overcome the intrusion.From baleen row, razor clam edge, rabid willow ptarmigan plume, to white buds of plumeria, gardenia, lei, shaded grave of dried lauhala and graying niu, fertile Pacific essence swells these poems into hummock ice knolls, into layers and layers of white sea laps rolling, into mindfulness, consideration, climate care--belonging.From ulu, to cane knife, where aurora’s green vein bleeds blue and tangles into indigo or green-robed mauna combs t? stalks, palms, kukui, and pines. From Barrow to Waihe’e, tethered and hammered through wild among dark branches and snared by voices, these poems harbor whale and seal oil burning to bring sustenance to a reader’s search for light and with them carry us into a seafaring world of rich embrace. Spectacular, immediate, these beaches and beeches along the shores provide a tactile relationship made immense in their stream-crafted images.

This translation offers for the first time the splendid poems of Sidney West to English readers, supposedly their original addressees. West is among the best imaginary poets of America, allegedly his native land, and of all possible lands. His texts, although rich with exceptional life experience, will satisfy those who still believe in “the death of the author.” No less satisfied, in spite of his anti-romanticism, will be those captivated by “committed writing.” And in another paradox that West himself would have loved, if he had existed, what’s offered here constitutes a translation of a translation. An English version based on the prior version into Spanish completed in 1969 by Argentine writer Juan Gelman, one of the greatest living Latin American poets. He should be considered the genuine author of the author of these poems, and the poems themselves. Gelman’s superb text poses a radical question: must human beings in modern society die in order to recuperate their human condition? Something happens after the passing of the book’s thirty-five characters, their absence causes unforeseen consequences, generates certain kinds of presence. This profound questioning of Western assumptions surrounding death requires an innovative form that challenges the traditional boundaries between poetry and narrative, privileges the magical as a vital aspect of reality, and ultimately seeks a redefinition of the lyric persona. In The Poems of Sidney West, writing, without lessening its essential condition of creative practice, is conceived as an instrument not only to interpret but to transform the world.

Garden of Silica is the first poetry anthology of the Uruguayan Ida Vitale to appear in English, spanning eight books published from 1960 to the present. Vitale is one of the fundamental voices of Latin American literature, and her work also encompasses essays, short stories, journalism, and translation. She belongs to Uruguay's Critical Generation of the 1940s, whose mission was the construction of a participative intellectual subject. Vitale's poetry illustrates the incompatibility of the construction of that intellectual subject and realism. It is not the case of an idealist aesthetic that denies the existence of objective reality or offers only a testimony of individuality. Rather, these texts seek a balance between subjectivity and objectivity, and accordingly the private and the public. In addition, with a revealing gesture of feminist undertones, intellectual capacity is privileged above that of sentimentality. As a result, Vitale's message is implicit, requiring an active reader, one involved in the very process of creation. Placing the intellectual subject at the forefront, and thus relegating the national and the feminine to a second plane, Ida Vitale's poetry offers one of the most profound and provocative representations of women's subjectivity in the Spanish language.

Reasons for Writing Poetry is the first collection of verse to appear in English from the internationally acclaimed Peruvian poet Eduardo Chirinos (Lima, 1960). This selection of works, spanning nearly thirty years of poetic output, was carefully chosen for this edition by the author in collaboration with his long-time translator. Chirinos is well known in his native country and the author of sixteen books of poetry in addition to volumes of academic criticism, essays, translations, and children’s books. A member of Peru’s 80’s Generation, his work has been widely anthologized throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Several of Chirinos’s poems have appeared in literary journals in English translation.The present volume charts the growth of a poet whose fondness for masks is manifest in the frequently dialogic, even polyvocal discourse of his work. Chirinos’s poetry is marked by a wry tone and simple lyric eloquence. Accessible, ironic, and always entertaining, the poems in Reasons for Writing Poetry treat time and again Chirinos’s favourite subjects and themes: the return to childhood, the vagaries of memory, the alternative reality of dream, a fascination with animals, the utility of seeing and hearing, the writer’s place in poetic tradition, and the never-ending search for originality through innovative expression.

Calling upon the personal memories and ancestral antecedents of her Anishinaabe family heritage, Molly McGlennen writes poems for Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits that render the continuance and celebration of the complex realities of Native American life in the 21st century. The collection of finely rendered lyrical and narrative pieces recounts the story of physical and spiritual nourishment, as the poet begins by telling her readers that her poems, like family recipes, are best served aloud, shared as gifts, and regarded as pieces of gratitude to be given away. Telling us how “memories flesh her fully,” McGlennen paints an intricate but compassionate picture of growing up “away from the lakes that have always fed her family,” and of urban life where she and the neighbor kids shoot hoops in alleyways and “fall asleep in the backs of old cars.” Operating as a sort of give-away, McGlennen’s collection weaves childhood memories, family histories, and present-day memorials as a means to forge paths of continuance of Indigenous culture. Narratives range from the connective trails of blueberry picking and walleye fishing, to the tragic freeways of protesting an execution at San Quentin, to the regenerative passageways of falling in love and giving birth. Finally, through the gesture of feeding “those networks of connection,” each poem invigorates the life-ways inherent in sustaining cultural relationships even when one finds herself a great distance from her home.

Luis García Montero (Granada, 1958) is one of the most read and influential Spanish writers today. He is an essayist, fiction writer, journalist, professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Granada, and, principally, a poet. He has received numerous important honors, like the National Poetry Prize (1994) and the National Critic’s Prize (2003), both in Spain, and the Poets of the Latin World Prize (2010), in Mexico. He has published eleven books of poetry, represented in The World So Often, his first anthology in English.Luis García Montero’s poetry has commonly been considered – even by the author himself – as realist, yet this is a misinterpretation. His poetic subject doesn’t try to trap the reader in an illusory world offered up as natural, but rather to break with the automatic perception of things and facts, and so avoid catharsis. What’s crucial here is the use of a language that does not try to be transparent, a simple instrument of communication, and that risks its neck to be noticed. It’s a language that is both reflection and matter, and thus, has the agency to change things, the capacity to transform. Moreover, this language is not limited to the lyrical tradition, it doesn’t discriminate against words in any way, it becomes democratized. By combining prosaism and tropological density, it searches for a discourse with a greater power of representation and participation. In short, García Montero’s work achieves a balance between sentimental rigor and intellectual outpouring, rejects solipsism, and goes deeper into dialogical poetry.

In To World, poems interrogate everything: nature, society, and thought itself, with no prejudice or even principle. In other words, they don’t follow any rule, tradition, or discipline; they are decidedly critical. Thought is not reduced to philosophical, ethical, religious, political, or aesthetic interpretations. Rather, we are before thought in its totality, unwilling to recognize borders  –  although never in a pure state, not falling into speculation, into thinking just for thinking’s sake. Thought is always related to ­experience, both personal and collective, and above all, emotion. It never once stops being thought through image, that is to say, lyrical. This poetry speaks of poetry; it takes it all on: the objective and subjective, the real and imagined, I and other. It ventures into virgin territory, on the outskirts of romanticism, realism, symbolism, and the avant-garde. Always a model of rebelliousness and freedom, a lesson in devotion and rigor, Gelman’s work places him among today’s best poets.

"A distinctive, important new voice" – Jo ShapcottTim Cresswell's poems delight in language and geography, and the collision point of the natural and the urban. A fox climbs to the top of a London skyscraper; sandworts take root in abandoned mine shafts; and geological time is glimpsed through the 'crushed structures' of the city. Cresswell is interested in hinterlands, the in-between places: airport lounges, urban parks, the muddy verge of a river. The title sequence is a startling examination of man's relationship with the very stuff of earth, redeploying the language of science and archaeology with surgical precision and innovative flair. Soil introduces Tim Cresswell as a significant new poet of place, and our changing relationship to it."If this poetry was a geological formation, it would be layered and folded, with scientific knowledge and a quick linguistic wit, with echoes of folk song, unsentimental ecological awareness, word games and a sharp but not unkind eye on the everyday – all this, but metamorphic too, fused by human warmth into a memorable voice."Philip GrossTim Cresswell is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of four books on the role of space and mobility on cultural life. Soil is his first collection of poetry.

"A spectral volume, born of a fence that separates nowhere from the now and here, deep in the high Arctic" ROBERT MACFARLANE"Tim Cresswell's poems unsettle ... A distinctive, important new voice" Jo ShapcottFence is an epic of fragments that is at once beautiful and beautifully strange. In his exploration of the vast, frozen Svalbard islands, poet and geographer Tim Cresswell has created a kind of exploratory poetry whose taut, minimalist lyric synthesises subjects as diverse as history, politics and Arctic ecology. Echoing the mournful atmospherics of the great Anglo-Saxon elegies, this book-length poem is a powerful meditation on places that are slipping away, where ‘compass gone haywire / so north’.