AMERICAN INDIAN POETRY: An Anthology of Songs...

AMERICAN INDIAN POETRY: An Anthology of Songs and Chants, edited by George W. Cronyn (Fawcett: $10). Gathered from tribes all over North America, these songs and poems are as beautiful as they are diverse. A Cherokee love charm asks, “Let her put her soul in the very center of my soul, never to turn away./ Grant that in the midst of men she shall never think of them.” A tragic sorrow permeates the evocations of winds, buffalo and a Spirit Army in the Ghost Dance songs, while an Omaha birth song calls to the powers of the cosmos to smooth the path the newborn child must tread. A Sia invocation beseeches the heavens to bring rain: “Cover my earth mother four times with many flowers./ Let the heavens be covered with banked up clouds.” This valuable anthology offers the reader rare insights into Native American culture, but a more thorough discussion of the original meters and the relationship between poetry and the other arts in Amerindian civilizations would be welcome.