Like the Sun in Storm by Ralph Salisbury (review)

Ralph Salisbury is a poet unjustly neglected, whose publishing history in major outlets far predates that of N. Scott Momaday, and whose compacted, imagistic verse holds simple truths that speak nonetheless of a lifetime's thought. His poems glow with tender reverence for the natural world and a fierce, sometimes overwhelming, indignation at humanity's destructive warmongering in the midst of such beauty. His recent collection of selected and new poems, Light from a Bullet Hole (2009), revealed just how powerful his facility for tightly compressed images has remained over a long career, and this new collection, Like the Sun in Storm, contains several pieces that can comfortably sit alongside that lifetime's achievement.

Salisbury's vision has always been palimpsestic. Certain identifiable and recurring layers of memory and experience again and again are seen peeking through evanescent moments of present experience. Sometimes it is the atrocity of his Cherokee-Shawnee ancestors' loss and the way that it undermines foundational American mythologies that is uppermost, as in the opening poem of this collection, "An Indian Blows Up Mt Rushmore and Indianizes What Cannot Be Resanctified" (4). Here the great ecocide of the national memorial crumbles under imaginative assault, punned into "Rush Less," with dead presidents erupting from the ground under pressure from "Indian incisors" to protect Indigenous peoples at last. Indeed the first section of Like the Sun in Storm (titled "The Struggle for Survival") is largely devoted to "Indian" poems, carefully arranged to move the reader from angry confrontations with historical injustice ("Putnam Township School Number Five," for instance, clearly indentifying Andrew Jackson with Hitler as genocidaire), to assays into the question of recovering spiritual teachings from the past, with invocations of Uktena, Deer, and "The Being we Cherokees believe humans can not name" (7), to a final diptych of poems (one autobiographical) about Indian children alone in the night. The placement of these last two poems seems to suggest a loss that has come in no longer seeing the world in terms of "Counselor Wolves and Ancestor Bears," a loss made all the more dramatic in the second poem by the speaker's lack of knowledge that would enable him to connect the stampeding "silent pasture stars" with the wings of Raven Mocker.

The second recurrent layer in Salisbury's writing is made up of what seems to have been a seriously tough hardscrabble rural childhood lived in the darkest heart of the Great Depression. His various biographical statements show that the alcohol-soaked, violent father figure that over-shadows several of his poems is rooted in real experiences ("my own father Indian, half, / hard-working and loving, half, / then dangerous, pistol-shooting drunk" [41]). So, too, the loss of a brother to malnutrition and a childhood spent trapping to keep the family from starvation. Salisbury shows that a childhood lived in poverty marks the adult forever, with his speaker always conscious of the blessings of the world, always ready for disaster. But he also makes use of the child's experiences to build empathy with others living in hard times, a blue-collar sensitivity that gives his poetry its lyrical toughness ("eight hours, to feed your family," and "eight hours until pepperless soup" [19]). This working-class voice permeates the second section of the book and reminded me tonally of some of the work of Gogisgi, a fellow Cherokee poet with a hardwon humor and empathy for all caught in the machines of Molochian capital. The third section, "A Look Around, and Beyond," remembers deceased family members with a concentration on the redemptive qualities of time ("the kind grandpa / the violent drunk / who fathered me" [36]). Perhaps due to the always hovering danger of sentiment clouding such insights, this is probably overall the weakest section of the collection, though individual poems sparkle.

The transformative moment in Salisbury's life, the palimpsest layer to which his poetry returns probably above all others, came the moment that he signed up to...