Customer Reviews

In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although many of the poems in this book are difficult and dense, the writing and ideas are so engaging that the reading is worth the effort. Native American themes run throughout the book, as well as how language prohibits/encourages communication. The book is separated into two parts, "The Wars" and "Mad Love." The poems of "The Wars" are at times very depressing, especially "Strange Fruit," Harjo's version of a Lewis Allan song, and "For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash...", but as such are valuable insights into cultural and personal conflicts. In "Mad Love," the poems are much less concrete, and sometimes difficult to understand. The reward comes in the discovery of personal meaning. Personal favorites include "Fury of Rain," "Unmailed Letter," and "Blue Elliptic." I loved this poetry book, and continue to go back to it time and time again for beautiful quotes and inspiration.

Harjo is an excellent poet - her poetry is always truthful even if the truth is one that we prefer not to face. This book contains a number of prose poems as well as modern verse; it is clear that Harjo writes what is true and allows it to take the form in which it presents itself.

This collection includes poems that explore human relationships, music, death ... universal concerns written about in a way that recognizes and uses the universality while selecting the images from her Cree background. We are privileged to glimpse another way of relating to the world while being presented with the difficulties of growing up in a minority culture. "At five I was designated to string beads in kindergarten. At seven I skew how to play chicken and win. And at fourteen I was drinking."

But her command of the language amkes even the starkest reality beautiful: "I am fragile, a piece of pottery smoked from fire / made of dung, /the design drawn from nightmares. I am an arrow, painted / with lighning ...

Harjo is one of the best contemporary poets. Try any of her books and you'll see a poet, a musician, a painter all sharing their vision with you.

"In Mad Love and War" is a collection of poetry by Joy Harjo. According to the author bio at the end of the book, Harjo is a member of the Creek (Muscogee) Native American nation, and grew up in Oklahoma and New Mexico. Much of this book reflects this heritage: "We were a stolen people in a stolen land" (from "Autobiography").

"In Mad Love" contains many cultural and historical allusions embedded in a complex web of surreal imagery and autobiographical-sounding fragments. Harjo seems to be trying to transcend both linguistic and cultural barriers; she notes that "All poets / understand the final uselessness of words" ("Bird"). She does not only focus on the Native American experience; she also has a number of African-American cultural references. She takes us, among other places, to a prison riot in West Virginia and a political discussion in Nicaragua.

Although I found some of the book opaque when I first read it, I found "In Mad Love" to be very rewarding on second and third readings. Harjo's language is often quite startling, and achingly beautiful. Much of the book seeks to find a link between the contemporary urban experience and the world of myth and nature. Throughout the book are many references to animals: the trickster Rabbit, "iridescent dragonflies," "a / turtle's nose above water," etc.

Harjo writes of flooding the city "with a revolutionary fire" ("City of Fire"), and indeed the book does have a strong political flavor. Her melding of political commitment, intimate passion, myth, and multicultural awareness makes "In Mad Love and War" a demanding and intriguing read.

This is my favorite Joy Harjo collection--one that has a permanent place on my table (no bookshelf for this treasure) and one that I frequently gift to others. These poems reach deep into the heart to connect with spirit and all the beauty, despair, struggle, and triumph of the human experience.

A few Amazon reviewers found some of the imagery inaccessible and some thought it "depressing." As an Indigenous woman, I experienced the opposite as I felt Harjo had been peeking through my blinds. In fact, the cultural and traditional metaphor invoked in these poems make them more accessible and more relevant for me as an American Indian woman living on occupied land in urban America. While there is dark reality in my experience as an Indigenous woman, there is also incredible joy, and much resilience gifted to me by my mother and hers as inheritors of a world not of our making. Harjo speaks to all of these. Undoubtedly, the culturally unfamiliar will find these poems more accessible with successive reading. Perhaps an inkling of the Indigenous experience will be the greatest value. Joy Harjo's poetry is inclusive of the spiritual, political, socio-economic, emotional, cultural, historical, and traditional inheritance that is ours.

The book's division into two sections, "In Wars" and "Mad Love," made little sense as each of these poems speaks to both mad love and war. As in life, the polarities and everything between are inseparable as in "Nine Below," or "Heartshed," or "The Bloodletting," or "Unmailed Letter."

Two of my favorites are "City of Fire" and "Original Memory," the latter lamenting and crediting doubt as a repeated manifestation in the human experience with Rabbit as creator (as I read it, anyway), and ending "We sip wine, do a hit of courage, each of us imagining another spin of the wheel, and take up our horns again. Rabbit, who invented the saxophone and who must have invented our imaginary lovers, laughs through millennia. And who are we to make sense of this slit of impossible time?" As a poet, I was stunned to discover metaphor similar to my own in these two selections. I have found the same to be true with Sherman Alexie. I can only assume that it is shared sorrow and something less than triumph, perhaps our will, as Indigenous people that accounts for this.

In Mad Love and War is a powerful collection of poetry that grabs you, haunts you, and begs you to return.

Joy Harjo is reason enough to read poetry. Although IN MAD LOVE AND WAR is not one of my favorite Harjo collections, it is worth reading. In "For Anna Mae Pictor Aquash," Harjo writes, "Beneath a sky blurred with mist and wind,/ I am amazed as I watch the violet/ heads of crocuses erupt from the stiff earth/ after dying for a season,/ as I have watched my own dark head/ appear each morning after entering/ the next world/ to come back to this one,/amazed" (p. 17). In this book, Harjo writes poetry in "a language of lizards and stones" (p. 9), which is not always easy to understand. In fact, for me, many of the 44 poems here are impenetrable. Still, there are plenty of rewarding moments along the way, e.g., finding grace "with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80" (I), "hearing songs in pine trees" (p. 5), and "looking at the stars in this strange city, frozen in the back of the sky, the only promises that ever make sense" (p. 5), making this a book of poetry worth
exploring.

G. Merritt

Excelent poetry! I first encountered this book during the '90s in a college Native American Lit class. I have returned to its pages again and again for inspiration and guidance! Harjo has an exceptional way with words and imagery and I continue to find deeper meaning in her work with each reading.