Customer Reviews

Shapeshift (Sun Tracks)

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In the 1920s, the then new-rage modern dancer, Isadora Duncan said "the entrance comes before the exit and the exit before the entrance." She meant life is circular and interwoven--a journey with repeated feelings, roots, and themes. Her idea came immediately to mind when I read Sherwin Bitsui's SHAPESHIFT. This little book of poetry blends Navajo mythlogy and modern America in a non-linear post-modern fashion. The idea of constant change permeates the book. Horses peel into sunflowers. Leaves curl around a hand and swallow it. Yet as the changes swirls, Bitsui inserts constant references to his Navajo roots and spirituality, giving him, and us a place to hang on and start fro, to cope with whatever comes. It is this firm sense of place that holds SHAPESHIFT together. Finding our place in each poem, we can then take our time to savor Bitsui's rich, and sometimes unexpected imagry and universal message--we all must deal with change in our own way. SHAPESHIFT is his way of coping. We can join him on his journey of learning how, because if we know our place in the universe, we can return to it and drew strength from it to go out again and face our ever changing world. The very name SHAPESHIFT reflects this thought. The word implies change, (shifting shapes) and has firm roots in Navajo tradition. However, SHAPESHIFT is not an easy book to read. It can take several passes to get into Bitsui's images and ideas. But once that happens, he offers a a unique philsophy to adapt to our own lives.

While Bitsui's work readily draws comparison to the work of Luci Tapahonso and Esther Belin, it belies the character of dissonance at work and that Bitsui, far from being derivative, has sculpted his own aesthetic out of his cultural persoectives. In Bitsui's work, as in the moral and psychological universe of Mediterranean poet René Char, Dine (Navajo) wisdom retains its unique and radical difference from the cold world of Puritan postmodernism. For Bitsui, the ceremony of integration is not an easy one. Things do not merge into a blurred likeness, they do not compromise each other, or themselves, by doing so. Each extreme keeps its extreme nature, and this, for me, is what gives Bitsui's work its knife edge. These are not poems of easy transcendence, despite the creative drive to transform pain into something which might bless or save us. His is a sensibility shaped by a landscape in which the forces of mountain, sky, sun, and desert exist together in their most concentrated and relentless forms and Bitsui's aesthetic acknowledges the surrealism of everyday life, leaping from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, and make references to what are, for me, the more powerful spheres of intuitive, spiritual, and sexual knowing that appear informed by his culture. Whatever one's opinion of Bitsui's work, he is certainly a poet to watch, this volume selling out of its first printing within the first eight months of its debut.