by Duane Niatum

West End Press,
Albuquerque,
2000, paper, $8.95, 70pp.
Reviewed by David L. Moore

Duane Niatum, a key figure in the poetry of the contemporary Native Americanliterary explosion, has produced a sixth collection of poems. It's an importantevent. While some of his peer poets who started in the 60s and 70s, notablyJames Welch and Ray A. Young Bear, have turned to prose fiction, Niatumcontinues to work his expressive magic in this lyric genre. These poems,many new ones and some reworked from earlier publications, reaffirm Niatum'sunique place among modern voices, Native and not. Like other Indian writers,he connects his intense personal experiences to roots deep in an Indiantradition, expressed in Euroamerican literary forms. Yet he embraces thoseEuroamerican influences with more enthusiasm than most. Niatum makes referenceto his greatest influences in both his Klallam grandfather and in his "mentors"--Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, and the English Romantic poet, JohnKeats. (In interviews, he also mentions as influences Thomas Hardy, T.S.Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Octavio Paz, W.B. Yeats,Pablo Neruda, and Wallace Stevens, as well as artists Henri Matisse, PaulKlee, Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, and jazz master Charlie Parker,among others.)

In his generous Preface to The Crooked Beak of Love, Niatumwrites of what he has termed elsewhere his "eclectic" sources,"I believe it would be in our artistic community's interest to utilizewhat is best in both cultures and attempt to heal the old, old wounds, withreciprocity being an inherent part of the healing." That theme of artas healing and survival has animated his career. The Preface is indeed anapologia and personal manifesto: "My aesthetic position has alwaysbeen to learn and grow from whatever sources or knowledge were available.. . . Art continues to offer the opportunity of surviving in both worldsno matter how challenging that may become at times."

Indeed, Niatum crafted some very fine sonnets in the classic Europeantradition in his previous book, Drawings of the Song Animals(1991), but in this collection, as elsewhere, we can read those Europeaninfluences more in a certain Keatsian personalized voice. This individualfocus especially ventures here into love poems in the third section "LoveChanges the Spirit and the Dance" (the other four sections are "FirstPeople," "Windows," "Poems to Leave Under a Tree,"and "Moon Stories").

For instance, in the poem "Moonrise at Oak Bay," both lovelyand harsh, the lover's personal voice drives the romantic imagery and thecontrasting memories of historical family dysfunction:

We lie in the sand to blend in;

you shape from clay the moon's necklace,

pinch out of her the August night's

abalone sheen, a path to match

the bear-grass dunes of the sky. . . .

 

. . . I warned you my family holds together

like sawdust board in a winter gale.

 

You see generations of Klallams shake

and scatter like their subtracted history;

already quarrels filled the day

with the smashed bottles of old feuds. . . .

The final stanza focuses all this history and emotion on the sensationsof self, merging painfully with cycles of loss and vague renewal:

When my soul quiets down from the seizure,

we huddle under a blanket leaning

for the far country of the next county;

write in the sand that we will leave

these ashes on the morning tide.

One of his many memorable lines in this section of love poems arisesin a piece on Rome, with references to Paris, "In Your City of Stone,Sculpture and Ruin (for Rosa)":

I know you as a woman from the forest

of Fontainebleau who skipped down

the mountain path to pick

my heart like a persimmon.

We find mostly mythic characters, rather than people, in these love poems,among memories and dreams, though they come alive through such vivid lines.Some of the poems in other sections move the mythic into the personal, ratherthan vice versa, as in "Moon of Chinook Winds," when he asks ofthe crow who "preens himself in the sun," "Is he my grandfather?"

It may be safe to say that Niatum's intense love poems, so wrapped inan individual consciousness, tend toward tragedy, whereas his poems of natureand culture, striving for a voice rising on the wind in the cedars of hisancestors, tend toward reconciliation of history and promise. An examplewould be "His Medicine Man," in the "First People" section.The opening two couplets push that personal voice into ancestral dimensions,and they land on a line of Niatum's vivid imagery:

The bone comedian jumps right out

of the dream to lurk before my bed;

 

steps north and south, east and west;

his clapper whirrs like a legless wasp.

The poem recounts a dream struggle with "Old Grease Bowl,/ the uninvitedTrickster," who challenges and teases and torments the speaker untilthe dreamer stands strong in the chaos:

I try to shame Big Stink Claw

with my own death bundle. . . .

 

. . . I declare wearing

 

my own Changer mask that if

the wily wizard doesn't jump

 

from my bedroom into someone

else's jumping dream, I will.

As the poem continues toward its "fog blanket" finale, thevoice has succeeded in blending the personal and the traditional, perhapsthe central goal of many Native writers.

Even among some Native audiences, Indian writers are "expected"to speak with a communal voice, and Niatum does affirm his tribal roots:"My grandfather's life and stories became the touchstones of my lifeand art. The center of my artistic self starts from his home and his parents'home which was almost on the beach. Therefore, my grandfather's place ofancestors will go on shaping and nourishing my life and art to the grave"(Preface). Many of the poems in Crooked Beak speak of ancestralspirits, often through long, intricate sentences, which launch complex linkagesto traditions, as from "Song of the Yellow Pine":

To honor the shadow people

who bring us our songs in dreams,

we dance down the hill and wait

for the fire to spark and light the sky

with Oatsa's awl weaving our lives

into the story of the day her grandchildren

picked chokecherries until darkness

took away the path, the day

she teased her husband, Niatum.

Niatum, who was given his Klallam uncle's name, in fact cites this poemin his Preface as particularly connected to "the Indian side of mybeing," as he affirms that most of these poems are connected to thoseroots as well, whether obviously or not. As a master of resonant lines (andtitles), Niatum's imagery of cedar groves and salt-water beaches seeps intomany of his pieces, as we can see in these lines from "To Our SalishWomen Who Weave the Seasons":

. . . How do

I speak with these women in bark capes

and hats who spin in

 

and out of my life like a wedding on fire? How

read the hands of these elders the Transformer

 

promised a healing path

out of darkness and despair so the words of our

 

storyteller would always be caught in the sunstone's

net, at the long pauses of the short notes?

 

These women clack

humor-rattles and teach us the power of laughter

 

to switch the lights back on, soothe our fears,

tie our family and the villages to the center

 

of the basket. . . .

In the midst of these rich images of traditional humor and healing, thereremains Niatum's individualized voice, somewhat alienated, certainly lonely,wandering wounded by "the ravagers" who have made "our ancestralmountains . . . as barren as the backs of mangy dogs." He must askthe question of "How/ reach the hands of these elders," and whenhe launches the poem with "I try to sleep/ on a tule mat to see whatthe dream/ shows of the last Klallam grandmother/ to weave such bulrushgrass," it is a fitful sleep where "Grandmother weavers oftencircle/ our struggles, come to witness people falling/ out of their skins. . ." Yet these "Salish Women Who Weave the Seasons" "humand sing until our grief turns to laughter/ on Crow's mirror." In aresilient moment of strength, all bound in racial suffering and mixed-bloodstruggle, the poem's climax affirms, "So every bone that wants/ tosing--sings; every nerve that wants to burn--burns." It is a remarkableexpression of passionate intensity, the poetry of history, myth, and mentalstriving channeled into nerve and bone, in ink and paper.

Niatum made his mark early as a poet and as perhaps the primary facilitatorand promoter of Native poetry by editing two of the most influential anthologies,Carriers of the Dream Wheel: Contemporary Native American Poetry(1975) and Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry(1988). These historic collections helped launched many poetic careers.Carriers came out after Niatum's first two books of poems,Ascending Red Cedar Moon (1974) and After the Death ofan Elder Klallam (1970) (when he was publishing under his formername, Duane McGinnis). The books that followed were Digging Out theRoots (1977), Songs for the Harvester of Dreams (1981),and Drawings of the Song Animals: New and Selected Poems (1991).

An early poem, "8 AM," published in American Indian II(1971) by The South Dakota Review, showed Niatum's descriptivepower so infused with personal intensity, and so filled with imagery ofSeattle and his people's water and land:

Under the terrace of the harbor window,

a piece of driftwood floats

like an abandoned row boat

among the logs and planks brought

in by the winter tide. . . .

 

My imagination tiptoes down the empty pier

like rain, then dives into the sea.

Now near the end of The Crooked Beak of Love, Niatum isstill working that imagery, but here he also articulates the question, whichhas so driven that intensity for so long. The question is posed by Ravento Killer Whale in the penultimate stanza of "Moon of Chinook Winds":

Grandfather, Great-Uncle Joe,

I chant for your stories older than the mountains:

as Raven asks Killer Whale,

is to swim the river of our sacred mountain

the medicine to cool my rage and fear?

Niatum writes in the preface to Crooked Beak that throughthe presence of his grandfathers he uses art to "resist, in my ownway, the destructive forces of mainstream culture." We can feel inhis lines both that struggle, the "rage and fear," and that achievementof transforming those forces into something both old and new. As he writesin "Muskogee Carrier of the Stories" of Louis Little Raccoon Oliver,an Oklahoma Creek poet of an earlier generation,

He played the flute for his aunts

who stomp danced around him; asked their

musician please bring the night and morning

sun into their hearts; chew and swallow

history and defeat like the roots

they will soon make into tea. . . .

Niatum chews and swallows this same history and defeat and makes somethinghealing out of it. As he wrote in the preface to his Harper's Anthology,"These cultural traditions do remain strong today. . . . Tribal peoplesare distinct, and to a large extent dispersed, but they have common concerns:kinship, Nature, art as a part of tribal religion, and cultural survivaland rebirth. These concerns have been shaped and reshaped in the culturefor thousands of years. Native Americans today have a further common tie:they are witnesses to an act of dispossession forced on them as native 'Indians.'"His paean to the Klallam trickster, "Raven the Great Toe Word Clacker,"sums up his own dancing art of survival:

Yet Raven is the mask master,

irony's gift in your love's eye,

bringing to the scene tossed light

 

to warm the shadow drifts

of your death defiant dance. . . .

David L. Moore, Assistant Professor of English at the Universityof Montana, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington. He teachesand publishes on Native American and American literatures, and has taughtpreviously at the University of South Dakota, Salish Kootenai College, andCornell University. He lives with his family in Missoula, Montana.