Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind

by N. Scott Momaday, TBD (Read by)

Overview

“Momaday must be ranked among the greatest of our contemporary writers.”—American Scholar

From Pulitzer Prize winner and revered literary master N. Scott Momaday, a beautiful and enchanting new poetry collection, at once a celebration of language, imagination, and the human spirit.

“Language and the imagination work hand in hand, and together they enable us to reveal us to ourselves in story. That is indeed a magical process. . . . We imagine and we dream, and we translate our dreams into language.” —from the Preface

A singular voice in American letters, Momaday’s love of language and storytelling are on full display in this brilliant new collection comprising one hundred sketches or “dream drawings”—furnishings of the mind—as he calls them. Influenced by his Native American heritage and its oral storytelling traditions, here are prose poems about nature, animals, warriors, and hunters, as well as meditations that explore themes of love, loss, time, and memory. Each piece, full of wisdom and wonder, showcases Momaday’s extraordinary lyrical talent, the breadth of his imagination, and the transformative power of his writing.

Poignant, inspired, and timeless, this is a collection that will nourish the soul.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798200969586
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/03/2022
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)

About the Author

N. Scott Momaday is an internationally renowned poet, novelist, artist, teacher, and storyteller whose works celebrate and preserve Native American heritage. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Academy of American Poets Prize, the National Medal of Arts, the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation’s Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, and the 2021 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. A longtime professor of English and American literature, he earned his PhD from Stanford University and retired as regents professor at the University of Arizona.

Table of Contents

Preface xv

The Original Storyteller 1

On Dreaming 2

Centaur 3

To Hold the Sun 4

The Scop 5

The Spiritual Gravity of Place 6

The Realization of Nothing 7

Guests 8

The Moonlight Passage 9

The Speech 10

To Mrs. Charles T. Bucket of Greenfield, Massachusetts 11

The Visitors 12

The Capture 13

The Close 14

The Dark Amusement of Bears 15

The Shadow of a Name 16

Landscape with Clouds 17

The Birthright 18

A Mantra 19

Observations 20

Ownership 21

Song of the Journey 23

Configurations of a Timeless Kind 24

Beat the Drum Slowly 25

Dreaming Bear Speaks 26

Merger 27

Time and Essence 28

Chivalry 29

The Night Dance 30

A Spell for Setting Out 31

An Act of Mercy 31

The Woman Who Held Sway 33

To Speak of Nothing 34

The Mask 35

The Hollow Log 37

In the Telling 38

The Woman at the Glass Door 39

On the Imagination 40

Passage 41

The Shield that Came Home 42

The Zebra Report 43

The Marrowbone Manuscript 44

A Profound Evasion 45

Witches 46

The Ice Woman 47

The Visions of Stone Carrier 48

Pai-Mahtone 49

The Shape Shifter 50

Belief 51

On Horseback he Sings 52

The Instrument 53

Alexander and Bucephalus 54

The Poet's Muse 55

The Hat 56

The Shout 57

The Meadow 58

The Octopus Dreaming 60

Arfig the Witch 61

The Explorer 62

Prints 63

A Dream of Becoming Old 64

A Stroke Upon the Earth 65

Miss O'Keeffe of Abiquiu 67

The Whisperer 67

The Death of Beauty 68

Transparency 69

Shadow 70

Prayer to the Sun 71

Banter 72

The Breath of the Infinite 73

Through a Lens of Cold 74

The Green Stick 75

The Ghost of Adam Meagre 77

Confusion 78

The Intruder 79

To a Child this Gift 80

The Tyranny of Time 81

Blood Memory 82

Imposture 83

Handprints 84

The Portrait of Spencer Kohl 85

Crows 87

The Burning 88

A Stone for Singing 89

One Hunter 90

The Efficacy of Prayer 91

The Ultimate Dream 92

A Moral Equation in Art 93

Forewarned 94

Madness 95

Facets of Discourse 96

Sunrise 97

The Wall 99

A Woman's Voice 100

The Child's Discovery 101

The Griever 102

The Whirlwind 103

The Reading 104

The Piano Teacher 105

World Renewal 106

End Note 107

Editorial Reviews

"The 100 poems and short sketches . . . are as simple and complex as our collective existence. . . . Each is a small gem, a glass seed that is part of the pattern on a piece of Native beadwork: By itself it has its own character and texture, its own beauty and completeness. Woven or sewn into the pattern created by the artist, the individual beads together anchor the art and become the design that tells the larger story." — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“The iconic Kiowa writer. . . [draws] deeply from dreams, fantasies, personal remembrance, and the wellspring of Native American spirituality to dissolve distinctions between the real and the surreal. . . . Bite-size snacks for the metaphysical appetite.” — Kirkus

"Add another entry of mystical lyrics to the still-expanding oeuvre of prolific Kiowa folklorist, novelist, and illustrator Momaday. . . . The book's long view and even pace bring out the best insights of this octogenarian's flourishing career." — Booklist

"Momaday’s poems are rich with description, lush with dreaming, and filled with magic. Essential for Indigenous collections and highly recommended for poetry lovers generally." — Library Journal (starred review)

"A collection that celebrates language, invention, humanity, and the natural world." — Publishers Weekly

"We couldn’t imagine a better soundtrack for a thoughtful weekend walk down whatever dream-like springtime trails you might have at hand." — Paste Magazine (on the audiobook of Dream Drawings)

"In many ways, to read Momaday is to read the land. It is to encounter the earth alive with wind and sunlight, with plants and animals, and to know all of it—each aspect of the world—by name. It is also to renew a reverence for beauty and a feeling of hope." — Stanford Magazine

From the Publisher

"In many ways, to read Momaday is to read the land. It is to encounter the earth alive with wind and sunlight, with plants and animals, and to know all of it—each aspect of the world—by name. It is also to renew a reverence for beauty and a feeling of hope."

Stanford Magazine

"We couldn’t imagine a better soundtrack for a thoughtful weekend walk down whatever dream-like springtime trails you might have at hand."

Paste Magazine (on the audiobook of Dream Drawings)

"Add another entry of mystical lyrics to the still-expanding oeuvre of prolific Kiowa folklorist, novelist, and illustrator Momaday. . . . The book's long view and even pace bring out the best insights of this octogenarian's flourishing career."

Booklist

★ 07/01/2022

A consummate storyteller whose works include many novels, plays, and poems, Pulitzer Prize—winning Kiowa author Momaday follows up 2020's Earth Keeper and The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems with a collection of 100 prose poems along with drawings by the author. Each piece blends seamlessly with what precedes and follows, and readers will find themselves inside the dream of these poems, held under the spell of turning the page. Momaday has created his own mythology here, his own world, stating that "language is magical…. We became human when we acquired language." As they encounter spirits and spirit animals—bears, eagles, and witches—they will also find much wisdom: "The story does not end. Rather it revolves on a wheel of telling." Those he pays homage to include Gwendolyn Brooks, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Rumi as he spreads out "a meadow./ On a carpet of colors/ I will meet you there." VERDICT Momaday's poems are rich with description, lush with dreaming, and filled with magic. Essential for Indigenous collections and highly recommended for poetry lovers generally.—Karla Huston

Library Journal

2022-03-01
The iconic Kiowa writer offers an assemblage of parables, poems, vignettes, and a few stark drawings, with the thematic underpinning that all stories are part of a larger universal story.

Momaday (b. 1934), winner of a Pulitzer Prize and numerous lifetime achievement awards, is acclaimed for his work as a fiction writer, poet, and essayist, often blurring the boundaries among categories. In this follow-up to Earth Keeper, the author pretty much obliterates those categories, drawing deeply from dreams, fantasies, personal remembrance, and the wellspring of Native American spirituality to dissolve distinctions between the real and the surreal. “I have heard the thunder of King Lear’s voice on the boards of the Globe Theatre in Elizabethan London,” he writes. “I was spellbound. Emily Dickinson read to me a poem she had written about crickets in which she realized a precision of statement that defies description.” Momaday suggests that if you have dreamed it, you have lived it, and that the you or I of whom you are conscious might itself be a dream. We see these ideas at work in “Dreaming Bear Speaks,” one of the many short narratives in which bears appear—usually not threatening, sometimes dreaming. “Perhaps he dreams of me dreaming of him,” writes the author. “He dreams of being me, of being human.” Night and day, dreams and awakening, fact and fantasy: The boundaries contained therein seem porous throughout these pieces, which combine elements of the fantastical and the matter-of-fact. Despite the title, there aren’t that many drawings, and they appear as representational inkblots, suggesting a tree or a crow or a human visage. The illustrations punctuate the narratives and underscore their thematic unity, but the narratives themselves also have a sketchlike quality—drawings with words. Momaday concludes that these pieces “are random and self-contained, and they are the stuff of story, and story is a nourishment of the soul.” Most spiritually open-minded readers will agree.

Bite-size snacks for the metaphysical appetite.

Kirkus Reviews