Review
"I keep thinking why bother with my Native American heritage. What does it matter? Let it go," writes Diane Glancy in a short preface to this splendid volume of haunted poems. Of course, it does matter precisely because she can't let it go; voices, figures, images, and wisdom from that heritage people her poetry like true natives of her imagination. In fact, the strongest poems in this collection (which was selected, by Nicholas Christopher, as the 1988 winner of the Capricorn Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Writer's Voice program of New York's Westside YMCA's Center for the Arts) are those that present "the remains of a heritage I feel everyday" most directly. Her short forays into familial, historical, and spiritual territories are inspired by stories, ceremonies, and visions passed down and invented, and spiked with images that surprise and inform: "the bundle of supper in our belly," the ancestors who "giggle under the bed/when I sleep their/new hunting ground the/floor of the dream." This is an excellent, original volume, one woman's brave attempt to fashion a personal voice from the cries and whispers of her Native American past. -- From Independent Publisher
