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Reviewed by:
  • Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas ed. by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, and: Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English: Whetu Moana II
  • Chadwick Allen (bio)
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke , ed. Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-8165-2891-2. 324 pp.
Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri, and Robert Sullivan, eds. Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English: Whetu Moana II. Honolulu: U of Hawai'i P, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8248-35414. 281 pp.

Two new anthologies offer a rich array of diverse, sophisticated, contemporary works by established and new Indigenous poets from across the Americas and from across Oceania, written in the sonorous varieties of global English, written primarily in these localized Englishes, or presented in English translation from Indigenous or Spanish originals. These anthologies will make excellent additions to reading lists for undergraduate and graduate courses in Native American, Indigenous, transnational, and world literatures, and they should spur both scholarship and creative response for many years to come. Their potential to invite comparative readings, analyses, and interpretations—on their own, in concert, or as part of larger groupings of the planet's Indigenous poetries—is especially exciting.

Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas features poems by no fewer than eighty-one different writers from what the editor, poet, and activist Allison Hedge Coke calls the "larger Native America," the "unbroken continent prior to the building of the Panama Canal," including writers with affiliations to places now known as the United States, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile (5, 4). Sing is an expanded version of Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry, the remarkable special issue of Poetry International Hedge Coke guest-edited in 2006. Where the title of the special issue emphasized the reality of ongoing Indigenous presence, of still being "here," the title of the new anthology emphasizes the "multi-millennia use of song as portico, as navigational instrument, as labor initiative, nourishment, and mechanism for endurance, and as ceremonial healing expedient for tens of thousands of generations of millions and millions of people" across the Americas (18). Hedge Coke has arranged the collected poems into seven sections, based on thematic, linguistic, and instrumental empathies, rather than on the countries of their authors' origins. This arrangement [End Page 116] is one of several ways Hedge Coke responds to the fact that Indigenous poets of the Americas typically are "separated from one another in the canon" by the conventions of commercial and academic publishers, by the orthodoxies and limited training of scholars, by the geopolitics of (post)colonial nation-states (8). Hedge Coke's table of contents re-recognizes the "old kinships and trade" across the hemisphere, creating "a unification of sorts" for "one long shared continent" of Indigenous poems (5, 10, 7).

In an unexpected symmetry, Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English also features poems by an impressive eighty-one different writers, from across Polynesian Oceania and the vast Pacific Ocean, including writers with lived, genealogical, and cultural connections to places now known as Aotearoa New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Hawai'i, Niue, Rotuma, Samoa, Tahiti, Tokelau, and Tonga. Mauri Ola is a follow-up volume to Whetu Moana (Ocean of Stars), the first anthology of Polynesian poetry in English, which the acclaimed Samoan writer Albert Wendt, the Maori scholar Reina Whaitiri, and the Maori poet Robert Sullivan coedited in 2003. Similar to Hedge Coke in the introduction to Sing, the coeditors of Mauri Ola describe the significance of bringing together seemingly disparate voices from across large expanses of geographical, political, linguistic, and cultural territory in terms of reestablishing older unities and networks of exchange, of creating a "forum that bring[s] our many voices together" (1). As they note in the introduction, the combination of the specifically New Zealand Maori term mauri, meaning "life force" or "animating energy," with the more broadly Polynesian term ola, meaning "well-being" or "life" itself, "makes the anthology more inclusive of all our peoples" and indicates "the life force that runs through all things, gives them mana [power, prestige] and holds them alive and together" (2). "For us," they assert on behalf of the diverse authors brought...

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