Unscathed on San Geronimo Day, I discovered later that the tricksters had permanently penetrated my consciousness. A lost key held me captive in a hotel room in New Jersey, until I found it inexplicably in the bathroom wastebasket. In Jemez Springs, New Mexico, I woke during the night to searing headlights, but there was no car. And there’s more.

Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans is a reissue of an anthology first published in 1975. Sacred Clowns won’t jump off the pages, but you will be reminded whose land you may be parked on—if you arrived after Columbus, that is.

A poetry anthology invites generalizations. At our best, we seek connections. At our worst, we engage in stereotypes. The poets—14 men and 7 women, representing 21 different tribal affiliations—move me, with a magical, musical blend of experience and craft shared by good poets everywhere. Editor Kenneth Rosen says in his introduction, “in these poems… memory and past experience are somehow holy, sacred, to be handled with care,” which isn’t necessary unique to Native American poetry. In a grander and more inclusive statement which absolutely rings true regarding the poetry in this volume, Michael Ryan, in his essay “Poetry and the Audience” says: “…in this historical moment poetry seems both more anachronistic and more important as a custodian of time, a preserver of bodily memory in its rudimentary sense, the one million years of humanity and four billion years of life of the earth.” And he subsequently quotes Heinrich Zimmer, writing about Native American storytellers, “Each poet adds something of the substance of his own imagination, and the seeds are nourished back to life.” Yes, that’s it. That’s what it feels like to read Voices of the Rainbow, which has as much range as reverence.

Turn to the first poem in the volume, “Winter Burn” by Roberta Hill, of the Wisconsin Oneida tribe. You will sigh as if settling into a warm mineral spring at Ojo Caliente. From the first stanza:

When birds break open the sky, a smell of snow
blossoms on the wind. You sleep, wrapped up
in blue dim light, like a distant leaf of sage.
I drink the shadow under your ear
and rise, clumsy, glazed with cold.
Sun, gleaming in frost, reach me.
Touch through the window this seed that longs
little by little to flare up orange and sing.
Branches turn to threads against the sun.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s (Laguna Pueblo) “Poem for Myself and Mei: Abortion (Chimle to Fort Defiance, April 1973)” says not a word about what took place—but white space equals sorrow, and the poem ends with butterflies—you have to go back to the beginning of the poem to find them. They “die softly/ against the windshield/ and the iridescent wings / flutter and cling/ all the way home.”

In Janet Campbell Hale’s (Coeur D’Alene) bereft and skinny poem, “Desmet, Idaho, March 1969” she writes of hearing the ancient tribal language, as older people at her father’s wake speak to her as if she understands.

“Flock”, Lance Henson (Cheyenne) is a six-line, supremely elegant poem where “snow moves / like an ancient herd.”

There are angry poems, like Anna Walters’s ( Pawnee/ Oto) “A Teacher Taught Me”, “a teacher taught me / more than she knew / patting me on the head / putting words in my hand / –“pretty little Indian girl”, with each stanza ending with “laugh and say – “aye”. Carter Rivard’s (Osage) “Advice From Euterpe” begins: “They hire you for the silk to line their budgets / and give you immortal tenure / among the well-thumbed leaves / until you spin”. Lew Blockcolski’s (Cherokee / Choctaw) “The Urban Experience” Parts One and Two disturb and engage me with their anger as well as sorrow: “so one anxious evening, everso late, / in the cream white of his jail cell / he dreamed the midnight dancers / buried him head down.”

Sorrow and the ghost of Robert Creeley run through “Drunk”, with hungry and tightly woven, meticulously patterned tercets—a complex, eminently human poem by Caroll Arnett (Cherokee).

Harold Littlebird ((Santo Domingo / Laguna Pueblo) won my heart with the title of his poem, “For the Girls ‘Cause They Know”, which begins

good night, my two little cloud ladies
Elima, fat dark rain bearer
you are echoes of summer
the flooding of rivers
the shaping of arroyos
the treads in my eyes
Chamisa, gentle misty lady rain
you bring a joy to the fields

Anita Endrezze-Probst (Yaqui) enchants with “Raven / Moon,” a lush and lovely re-working of a Native American legend: “She tosses the Moon / to her wild-eyed son.”

These are just a few jewels from this book of 200 poems. Don’t be surprised if you have unusual dreams (thank you, tricksters), especially after reading the contributor’s biographical notes. Apparently an editorial decision froze them in the year 1975 which is as mind-bending as some of the poems.

Related Posts:

• Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva
• Met a Lunatic on Craigslist
• My Funeral Gondola by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
• X by Dan Chelotti
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger

Ponder the title of this book for a moment, or longer: The City She Was. Is the city gone? Is she gone? What or who is she now that she isn’t a city? Who is or was she? Is “she” the arbitrary pronoun for cities as well as ships? Is this a good time to deliberate over pronouns, when gender is gloriously and perplexingly fluid?

Turn to the title poem for clues and a sense of the poet’s anticipated destinations and landmarks. But even here, vertigo and ambivalence dominate, and I find myself searching the poems for the kinetic energy of a walker in the city; heel marks and muddy droplets. I want to overhear conversations on the streets. Give me someone who lights a cigarette so the bus can come. Or the smell of corn tortillas and garlic hanging in the air. I realize, though, this isn’t my
city—it’s The City She Was.

Section 1 opens with “Longing brings me to the bar. /Smoke swirling brings me in.”

Mind if I join you?

In Section 2: “the city depends on being the most something.” The city strives for over-the-topness, confident that a poet naturally gets that. What makes the city’s heart swell with pride? Is it something like Buffalo’s chicken wings? A smattering of brewpubs? The streets historically convoluted, so unplanned that visitors are ejected by the carload?

In section 3: “The city’s eye / revises my face, /so that fluorescence / makes an illegal, a yuppie, / a salesgirl or an angel / of the hole I make in the fog.” The city has an eye; it transforms the speaker and blurs her identity, freeing her to explore multiple personae. Throughout this volume, you will find engaging and lively persona poems.

The final section of the poem reveals the poet’s wish to tone down and transform the raucous urban/inner landscape:

Civic melancholy
pushes through the traffic, so
I don’t see right
in this Babel.
If I owned the city,
so little of it would be.
I pass over the avenue,
assemble some ending of mine
as a vision or a refusal.

And yet, what really could be subtracted from any city? Melancholy is immutable amongst commuters alone in their cars, listening to grim news or singing along anemically with Aretha Franklin or Gerry and the Pacemakers. You can’t extract the mentally ill, addicts or homeless people. They have to live. City smells and disturbing images hover with a vengeance.

Nevertheless, the poems have city energy; they’re driven fast and madcap. You’ll encounter white space about as often as a parking space in this city, where “Yellow streetlights bristle against the grid” and “Once the city was a he, his arms around / our congress with enough alchemy to narcotize, eyes rolled back.” Feast on poems with long lines and fantastical imagery; you want to get a second look but you’re at the next corner, and there’s more and more to see and hear. From what I imagine to be a studio apartment the size of a dime on the 47th floor, here’s a thoroughly city-afflicted speaker in “For About Five Minutes in the Aughts”:

And then, and then, and then. Met a lunatic on Craigslist.
Concerned about starts, I stuffed his inbox with amendments and bloated metonymy.
This happened for months. This happened while I healed from pneumonia,
from broken bones, from agoraphobia. Drinking beer gave me a panic, so whiskey.
Divorce ephemera, safe doors and pre-midlife. I collected fancy pens
and yeah, I’m working on an article about animé and Marxism. Pills
make me shaky, but I filled myself with pills because they made me shaky.

The poet’s got adrenaline but she also bleeds “because of a city in ruins”:

My heart bled today. It bled onto the streets
and the steps of city hall. It bled in the pizza parlor with the useless jukebox.
I’ve got so much blood to give inside and outside of any milieu.
Even for a bad zoning decision, I’ll bleed so much you’ll be bleeding,
all of us bleeding in and out like it’s breathing,
or kissing, and because it is righteous and terrible and red.

Who among has not wanted to play with those fantastic lines, “Because it is bitter, / and because it is my heart’” from Stephen Crane’s “In the Desert?” I’m struck, though, not by the volume of blood spilled but by the fact the heart itself bleeds. Who are you calling a bleeding heart, I want to ask. Are you a member of the Order of the Bleeding Heart, from the middle-ages, worshiping the Virgin Mary? If not, be prepared to bleed like a liberal.

Naturally, the city’s got “Lunatics on my Avenue”, one of Giménez Smith’s expertly crafted prose poems. They shine the brightest in The City She Was. The penultimate paragraph:

All of the lunatics’ variations share equity of scale. At night they’ll live in the warehouse, bunked up in tiny rows like the reflections of windows in apartments. My lunatic’s the king. He gives the others maps and directions for making their way through the city, like where to lurch and what corners are good for cigarettes.

Lunatics, and “Sometimes There’s a Virgin”, delivering dark humor:

I brush past her to feel her virginity. There’s a big
difference between virgin and non-virgin, aura-wise.
Someone drives her home before eleven o’clock.
The virgin has a long driveway
at her house; a parent waits for her.
The virgin leaves her vibe behind, so we wait
for it to dissipate. Then we get nasty and high since
the virgin made us feel bad because we gave it up
in high school. That’s just her course. It’s not our fault.

The big yellow taxi driving this volume is “Rival”, a beautifully built machine of a prose poem. Here’s precisely where the osmotic wall between the speaker and her city dissolve in its surreal tale (Do I detect a nod to Russell Edson?), and in the book overall, the pleasure of reading a very talented young poet.

Read “The First Kiss,” our Day 6 entry in our 2012 National Poetry Month project, by Carmen Giménez Smith.

Related Posts:

• Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva
• Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans
• My Funeral Gondola by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
• X by Dan Chelotti
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger