When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry

by Joy Harjo (Editor), LeAnne Howe (Editor), Jennifer Elise Foerster (Editor)

Overview

Selected as one of Oprah Winfrey's "Books That Help Me Through"

United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology.

This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize–winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Diné poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Luci Tapahanso, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature, without which no study of American poetry is complete.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393356809
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/25/2020
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	114,907
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of nine poetry collections and two memoirs, most recently Poet Warrior. The recipient of the 2023 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and the 2017 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, she lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

LeAnne Howe is the author, most recently, of Savage Conversations. She teaches at the University of Georgia – Athens.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of Bright Raft in the Afterweather. She lives in California.

Editorial Reviews

"This anthology is revelatory and stunning.… It shows the remarkable strength and diversity of Native poetry, which vitalizes all of American poetry. It is essential reading."

Arthur Sze

★ 08/01/2020

A celebration of literary riches, this first-of-its-kind anthology of Native American poetry is a great witness to the joy and power of verse. Poet Laureate Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Nation, and her team have selected works from 161 writers and over 90 nations. Because determining who gets called a Native American can be difficult, the editors chose to include only works by enrolled tribal members or poets closely associated with an Indigenous community. Though the earliest poem is an elegy written by Harvard senior Eleazor (1678), much of the book focuses on contemporary and 20th-century poetry. The book is divided geographically into five sections, presenting a kind of journey that starts in the North-east, wanders to Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands, then down through the South and back through the Gulf to the Atlantic coast. There are familiar names here, old and new—e.g., Chief Seattle, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Layli Long Soldier, Tommy Pico, and Harjo herself—and stunning discoveries like Schoolcraft's "To the Pine Tree." First it is presented in Ojibwe with a literal, line-by-line translation, communicating the sound of the original with a hint of meaning; then Schoolcraft's own English translation allows us to witness not only the ineffable creative act of translation but also the act of inculturation, producing a poem tamed by 19th-century lyrical petticoats. Elsewhere, William Walker's "Oh, give me back my bended bow" captures a universal truth: no child wants to be trapped in a classroom with Homer when they could be outside joyfully living an odyssey! VERDICT Essential, and not just as a resource; this is amazing poetry. [See "Versifying," LJ 1/17/20.]—Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston

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