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  • Native Writer Profile:Ralph Salisbury
  • Arnold Krupat (bio)

The following brief essay will appear in slightly different form as the introduction to Ralph Salisbury's forthcoming book, Light from a Bullet Hole: New and Selected Poems, 1950–2008. Salisbury, a Cherokee from Iowa, born in 1926, has contributed to many journals and anthologies. Formerly editor-in-chief of Northwest Review, and the recipient of many awards, he is the author of nine books of poetry and two books of short fiction. He is currently professor emeritus at the University of Oregon and lives in Eugene, Oregon, with his wife, the poet Ingrid Wendt.

Now in his eighty-third year to heaven, Ralph Salisbury has gifted us with a volume of new and selected poems in which there is no diminution of powers but an amazing further blossoming.1 The selected poems range from his earliest volume, Ghost Grapefruit and Other Poems (1972), through the chapbooks Pointing at the Rainbow: Poems from a Cherokee Heritage (1980) and Spirit Beast Chant (1982), on to Going to the Water: Poems of a Cherokee Heritage (1983), A White Rainbow (1985), Rainbows of Stone (2000), War in the Genes (2006), and Blind Pumper at the Well: Poems from My 80th Year (2008).

Light from a Bullet Hole reprises "Some of the Life and Times of Wise-wolf Salt-town," as Salisbury etymologized his name in an autobiographical prose piece published in 1994 in Returning the Gift, and it brings us up to date.2 In "Scarlet Tornadoes," from Ghost Grapefruit, we discover that it was left to his father's "brother to tell me / that we were Cherokee," while in "A Black Half Moon," from Spirit Beast Chant, the child growing up tries out the names: "The [End Page 69] Cherokee—Tsaragi—Cave Men—Groundhogs / 'Yunwiya' their real name—'The People'—his own."3 From A White Rainbow come the poems "A Cherokee History Chapter Written Near the Globe Theater Site" and "Cherokee Initiation Rite: 1981," which may be compared to "Breed Kid's Initiation Rite: 1981," from Rainbows. "Three Visitations or Evocations," from the recent Blind Pumper at the Well, is dedicated to Joe "Dog" Smith, and it begins, "Old friend and fellow Cherokee."4 Also from Rainbows comes the lovely and moving "Being Indian," which opens, "Who we were seemed simple when gun / dropped meat onto plates." Its last stanza details change:

The path to Granny's apples and talesTurkey Creek's bramble-tangled bank;the road snow, mud or dust, from my parents' farm,to redskin-plundering Carnegie's free—now tax-supported—library—war,for national survival through colonial tyranny,was my Medicine Way into the 20th Century,being what I was not ever simple again.

The title poem of Rainbows, "A Rainbow of Stone," chronicles

my Cherokee people's buffalo, deer,plantations, even our holy town,Echota, generations gone.

To crime, monoxide, disease,and other city uncertainties.5

But in a vision that persists through Salisbury's work early to late, the poem concludes by imagining a time when

even the arrogant sky-scraperswill bend,and,

balled into foetal curl,

the whole earth will be toe-to-toerainbows, my own and Thunder's and your homeagain. [End Page 70]

In another poem from Blind Pumper, the poet appears at fourteen, in "War on, One Brother Sixteen, and I, Fourteen, Try to be Men." At fifteen, as "Direction of Storm," from Going to the Water, tells us, the young poet was struck by lightning on his family's Iowa farm: it "bleached my world / white like hospital sheets." In "Green Gophers," one of the new poems, the older poet sings back this young man

who dreamedof targets too big for my air rifle to killand was naughty, though never successfully,in stopping the singing of birds,and joined, as soon as I could,the really naughty army.6

The teenage World War II Army airman appears in many of the poems.7 Thus, earlier, in "Green Smoke," the poet had remembered how, at

. . . eighteen, I saved eight men,Nine if I count myself,. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .and now I'm a poetAnd try to save everythingI...

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