Again the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems by N. Scott Momaday (review)

This collection brings together selections from Momaday’s Angle of Geese (1974), The Gourd Dancer (1976), In the Presence of the Sun (1992), and In the Bear’s House (1999), providing a survey of his most important previously published poems in the first half of the book and showcasing new poems in the second.

Thematically the poems encompass meditations on Momaday’s ancestral and tribal heritage, reflections on the mystery and wonder of nature, memories of his extensive travels, evocations of the tragic nature of Indian/white relations, and reflections on the art of painting. In the prose poem “The Threads of Odyssey” Momaday concludes with these two lines: “Migration. It is a word that lies in my brain like a leaf. It rustles and turns, and it spins, like a weaver’s wheel, the threads of odyssey” (72). It is no wonder, then, that in Again the Far Morning Momaday spins the threads of his own odyssey through his personal and ancestral past, remembering George Poolaw, whose voice gave him his Kiowa name, in “To You Who Named Me,” and Keahdinekeah, his great-grandmother, whose hands’ soft touch he imagines in “Keahdinekeah, Her Hands.” He also travels back to “the homes of [his] spirit,” his father’s family’s homestead near Rainy Mountain, in “The Threads of Odyssey,” one of the new poems, and in another, “The Old Cemetery,” he returns to the place and presence of his Kiowa ancestors that he described in “Rainy Mountain Cemetery,” one of his early signature poems.

Other poems trace Momaday’s travels around the globe, from Munich to Moscow, from Brittany to Britain, from Umbria to Novosibirsk. And in another sort of migration he takes the reader to places that are haunted by the tragic consequences of colonialism: Wounded Knee Creek, in “December 29, 1890” and “Of the Ghost Dance”; Palo Duro Canyon, in “Blood Memory,” where the Kiowas were captured, and “Fort Sill,” where they subsequently endured incarceration; and Kiowa Boarding School, Anadarko, in “The Kiowa No-Face Doll,” and Carlisle Indian School, in “The Stones at Carlisle,” both monuments to the forced assimilation of Native Americans that ended in so much confusion, suffering, and death.

Momaday’s commitment to conserving America’s wild places and his concern for a sustainable planet are evident in many poems collected here. In poem after poem he exhorts the reader to marvel at the beauty of creation, to cherish it, wonder about it: “Surely that is worth dying for,” he exclaims in “The Threads of Odyssey,” “to see clearly the wonders of the wilderness and oceans and mountains, that is to earn one’s death” (71). In “Summer Song” and “Arctic Sketch Pad” Momaday draws landscapes of the Great Plains and the Far North with great economy of language, with minimalist strokes of a draftsman’s pencil, creating images that linger in the mind.

In another set of poems Momaday reflects on humanity’s earliest artistic expressions, recorded on rocks and in caves. His fascination with these cradles of art is palpable in “The Artists of Altamira,” describing a Paleolithic cave in Spain famous for its pictographs, and in “We Have Seen the Animals,” where Momaday wonders about the artists of Lascaux: “Whose hand has traced these living lines?” (lines 6–8). In “The Galleries” he wonders about the ancient muralists: “Do you sense them there, the ones / Who invented art” (1–2). Turning to modern art in “Sternenwandler—After a Painting by Emil Nolde,” he pays tribute to the German expressionist whose painting The Wanderer among the Stars already figures prominently in Momaday’s novel The Ancient Child.

Unfortunately, this review would not be complete without pointing to numerous editorial errors in the attribution of Momaday’s poems to the four collections in which he originally published them. The first four poems attributed to In the Presence of the Sun, “The Gourd Dancer,” “The Stalker,” “Long Shadows at Dulce,” and “Crows in...