Customer Reviews

The Shadow’s Horse

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Glancy has a unique and lyrical style that gives a wonderful sense of reverie to her verse: as if the poet and her readers were half-in, and half-out, of the waking world. Such a tone lends itself well to this book's meditations on subjects as different as night and day: the white vs. the Native world, Christianity vs. earth spirituality, ancestral pride vs. family shame.

But "The Shadow's Horse" is also just as fleeting and forgettable as the state of reverie itself. It's a small collection of very short poems, and many...particularly those that use the act of leaf-raking to symbolize fruitless efforts to control our lives and the natural world...seem like variant versions of one another.

Also annoying are the number of poems in which the inspiration is attributed to paintings, photographs, films, websites, etc. Although fine as stand-alone poems within the pages of a literary magazine, they become glaring under the slim covers of a collection such as this one; the reader feels as if he/she is reading student assignments from an art appreciation class. And if the reader of such a book truly feels as he or she has been transported into a Native dreamworld, nothing breaks that trance quite like seeing an Internet domain name referenced beneath one of the titles!

Released during the same year as the author's high-profile novel on Sacajawea, as well as Louise Erdrich's poetry collection "Original Fire", this book will probably be seen as more of a shadow than the horse in 2003's contributions to Native literature.