The Woman Who Fell from The Sky: Poems [Paperback]

Joy Harjo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 1996

Joy Harjo, one of this country's foremost Native American voices, combines elements of storytelling, prayer, and song, informed by her interest in jazz and by her North American tribal background, in this, her fourth volume of poetry.

She draws from the Native American tradition of praising the land and the spirit, the realities of American culture, and the concept of feminine individuality.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Along with N. Scott Momaday, John Trudell, and very few others, Joy Harjo is an essential Native American literary voice. She counts among her devoted readers Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, and Sandra Cisneros; her writing is infused with a generosity of spirit that accounts for much of her appeal. Dancing children, the attempt to heal a broken life, rising moons, and blue horses turning into streaks of lightning are the images Harjo uses to spin her yarns, and her words are spellbinding. Her talent is manifest in "A Postcolonial Tale": "Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff." And in "Wolf Warrior": "A white butterfly speckled with pollen joined me in my prayers yesterday as I thought of you in Washington." There is a lot of magic and a lot of hope woven through the dark backdrop of the poems in The Woman Who Fell from the Sky. Harjo is a treasure.

From Publishers Weekly

"The leap between the sacred and profane is as thin as fishing line." In her seventh book, Harjo (Secrets from the Center of the World), a member of the Creek tribe, makes this leap time after time. Working with a diction and a syntax that seem deliberately plain and declarative, she invokes ancient Native American myth, often from the midst of ordinary contemporary places such as Brooklyn, N.Y.; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago's O'Hare airport ("Chicago rose up as a mechanical giant with soft insides buzzing"). Her myths endow everyday experience with a transformative meaning that rescues Harjo's characters from their sometimes isolating individuality. Yet the myths also heed the details of individual experience as "the single complicated human becomes a wave of humanness." The warmth of her universalizing gift is inclusive, collecting the lives of taxi drivers, an infant granddaughter, and "an Apache man who is passing by my table in a restaurant." Readers may likewise feel swept up in the gentle wave of Harjo's poetry and prose poetry, where "every day is a reenactment of the creation story."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (August 17, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039331362X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393313628
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #108,520 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Making the connection with Harjo's poetry., August 26, 2000

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Woman Who Fell from The Sky: Poems (Paperback)

"I have a question for my soul," Joy Harjo writes in this book, "a creature who has little patience with crows--and less with snow. The question grows new leaves with each hard rain yet bends with grief at loss in the cold" (p. 26) After first reading this amazing book of poetry in 1996, I've returned to it many times. Something new is revealed with each reading, and along the way, Harjo has become one of my favorite contemporary poets.

Harjo writes that she is a poet "charged with speaking the truth about "the landscape of the late twentieth century" (p. 19). Written from a Native American, feminine perspective, her poetry here is filled with images of earth, sky, stars, bones, blood, rain (the "earth is wet with happiness," p. 12), and lightning ("A blue horse turns into a streak of lightning, then the sun," p. 48). In each poem, Harjo asks her reader the question: "do you see the connection?" (p. 51). At least for me, Harjo's connections are rarely obvious, but the poetic experience offered by her verse is always powerful. "It's possible," Harjo observes, "to understand the world from studying a leaf . . . It's also possible to travel the whole globe and learn nothing" (p. 57).

In her poem, "Witness," she connects walking the streets of Lucca, Italy with "driving the back roads around Albuquerque, the radio on country and a six-pack" (p. 42).

I recommend the breathtaking experience of making the connection with Harjo's poetry.

G. Merritt

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poet as truth-teller, October 29, 2000

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Woman Who Fell from The Sky: Poems (Paperback)

In this book, Harjo herself identifies poet with truth-teller; truth-teller is an accurate description of her work, especially in this volume. This volume contains several of the more political pieces on her album (with Poetic Justice) - the boarding schools, the unkept promises, the discrimination. Several of the piece blur the line between poetry and prose but read aloud a clearly poetry.

To read this poetry is to receive a gift, a grace of seeing another way to view the world - one in which the tree, the butterfly, the water speak and are connected to oneself. She clearly speaks from experience, from truth - not as some who tell such stories of connected for personal gain but as one to whom this telling describes her world. But in connectedness she shows the tears - the alcohol, 'Nam, enforced 'white culture' - the rips in the Native cultures that must be healed for the people to survive.

Excellent poetry - deep in meaning, superb in handling of language and image.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lyrical, Moving, Entrancing, July 9, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Woman Who Fell from The Sky: Poems (Paperback)

I must admit that I usually have a hard time reading poetry (a serious problem for a literature major!), but Joy Harjo's THE WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY is simply the most moving and eloquent group of poems I have ever read. From beginning to end, I was awed by Harjo's skillful use of language to convey not only impressions and emotions, but levels and varieties of meanings. I was especially moved by the title poem, which recounts a timeless love story -- these characters could be out of myth or they could be your neighbors, but either way the story is lyrical and passionate, the events flowing like eddies in a stream toward a natural conclusion. Most of the poems in the volume have this same motion -- of fated adventures that make one serenely happy that things turn out as they should. For lovers of poetry, stars, water and people, this is one volume of poetry that cannot be passed over