Customer Reviews

The Cherokee Lottery: A Sequence of Poems

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The impressive and memorable poetry comprising The Cherokee Lottery explores the forced removal of the Southern Indian tribes east of the Mississippi when gold was discovered on Cherokee land in northern Georgia in 1828. Journey to the Interior: He has gone into the forest,/to the wooded mind in wrath;/he will follow out the nettles/and the bindweed path.//He is torn by tangled roots,/he is trapped by mildewed air;/he will feed on alder shoots/and on fungi: in despair//he will pursue each dry creek-bed,/each hot white gully's rough raw stone/till heaven opens overhead/a vast jawbone//and trees around grow toothpick-thin/and a deepening dustcloud swirls about/and every road leads on within/and none leads out.

"THE CHEROKEE LOTTERY [is] a magnificent sequence that celebrates the Indians of the famous Trail of Tears....This is as fine in its way as similar poems by Robert Penn Warren, and it is an appropriate poem to have been written by a former Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress." --World Literature Today
"Smith accomplishes a remarkable poetry of fact and documentation..." --Publishers Weekly
"The richness of these poems makes the multi-layered task of memory a luxurious task." --Real Change
"William Jay Smith has been one of our best poets for more than sixty years, and THE CHEROKEE LOTTERY is his masterwork: taut, harrowing, eloquent, and profoundly memorable." --Harold Bloom

William Jay Smith was unknown to me as a poet or author before I picked this book up in a local library. "Cherokee Lottery" is an exceptional and refreshing book of poetry, a real pleasure to read. There is nothing tedious and overwrought here. The book begins with an invocation, and obviously the muse served the writer well. Each poem presents a chapter of historical fact and allows the reader to digest it without dipping into excessive negative pathos. The reader is brought to a new awareness of just what the plight of the southeastern Indians was. William Jay Smith has a great feel for language and how it sounds. In many ways I think this is the book of poetry I have been waiting to read for years. Now I want to read everything else he has written.

The impressive and memorable poetry comprising The Cherokee Lottery: A Sequence Of Poems explores the forced removal of the Southern Indian tribes east of the Mississippi when gold was discovered on Cherokee land in northern Georgia in 1828. Journey to the Interior: He has gone into the forest,/to the wooded mind in wrath;/he will follow out the nettles/and the bindweed path.//He is torn by tangled roots,/he is trapped by mildewed air;/he will feed on alder shoots/and on fungi: in despair//he will pursue each dry creek-bed,/each hot white gully's rough raw stone/till heaven opens overhead/a vast jawbone//and trees around grow toothpick-thin/and a deepening dustcloud swirls about/and every road leads on within/and none leads out.

Smith is not an Indian, although he claims to be. If you know anything about him, you'll know that he might be about 3 % or less Choctaw, but that has not even been documented. Yet he continues to make a huge deal out of it, as if it somehow makes him informed enough to write a book about Indians. The worst thing about this book is that is is told mostly from the white point of view. What is told from the Indian point of view (and there is precious little of that) suffers from Smith's fixation on the Noble Indian idea. Smith includes art from all these white artists who also had fixations on the Savage/Noble Indian...this is the kind of book that white readers will like, because it's not going to make them too uncomfortable. I suggest that Smith lose his white sources and read up on history written by those who were the most affected by the Removal: Native Americans. And get some humility: just because you might have a tiny bit of Indian blood does not make you qualified to write a book about the most humiliating chapter in American Indian history.