- Paperback: 88 pages
- Publisher: WW Norton (Aug 1 1996)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 039331362X
- ISBN-13: 978-0393313628
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 14.1 x 0.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 136 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #977,604 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
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 an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poet as truth-teller,
By
This review is from: Woman Who Fell From The Sky (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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Making the connection with Harjo's poetry.,
By
This review is from: Woman Who Fell From The Sky (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
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magical Reality in an Industrial World,
By Shanna A. Gonzalez "eyelevelbooks.com" (Gaithersburg, MD) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Woman Who Fell From The Sky (Paperback)
Joy Harjo's "Woman Who Fell From the Sky" encompasses many aspects of modern Native American life and, although it reflects a strong sense of her own cultural heritage, is not overtly political. In many of her poems she incorporates her religious tradition into modern contexts, effortlessly merging magical or mythical reality with the modern industrial experience. As she states in "The Place the Musician Became a Bear" (51-53), "It's about rearranging the song to include the subway hiss under your feet in Brooklyn."Harjo's writes in long poems, about one-and-a-half pages long, and uses complete sentences. Her style resembles prose only in form, however, for each sentence is dense with meaning and rewards close perusal. She chooses each word with care, working and re-working each sentence for maximum effect. Her sentences are so compressed, in fact, that a casual reader might fail to comprehend the full meaning of her work. Explanatory notes at the end of each poem are invaluable to understanding the meaning and context of her poetry. "The Woman Who Fell From the Stars" is a finely-written and inspiring book. The author's unique writing style rewards careful reading and re-reading, and, while she chooses heavy themes, she deals with them positively -- weaving pain, human cruelty, joy and love into a tapestry of life which is beautiful and understandable.
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