Description
Book SynopsisRevard’s poems are more like those of Seamus Heaney than those of Paul Muldoon – more like Robert Frost than Wallace Stevens, more like Mark Twain than Henry James. They are true stories, some from time on the Osage Reservation during Dust Bowl days, some from the Isle of Skye in Hippie Time, others from Creation Time in Las Vegas with Trickster, at the Hotel Empire in Manhattan with Dante, under dragons flying over St. Louis, dodging bullets while stealing watermelons, listening to humpbacked whales and wine-throated hummingbirds in Bellagio, parading with the Veterans of Foreign Wars to publicize some powwow in the old Indian-fighter headquarters at Jefferson Barracks on the Mississippi, sitting with Ponca cousins in a bar and hoping not to get shot after the occupation of Wounded Knee. The reason for every poem in this marvellous selection is to invite readers into its personal, familial, communal space to feast with the Ponca people and Revard on whatever they have on the table. These poems are all for having some kind of good time together, and the more the merrier.
Table of Contents
- Indian Territory
- Coyote Tells Why He Sings
- Geode
- Stone Age
- Skins as Old Testament
- Dancing with Dinosaurs
- Driving in Oklahoma
- What the Eagle Fan Says
- Birch Canoe
- In Chigger Heaven
- Close Encounters
- Wazhazhe Grandmother
- Ponca War Dancers
- Over by Fairfax, Leaving Tracks
- Getting Across
- Pure Country
- Cowboys and Indians
- Communing Before Supermarkets
- An Eagle Nation
- Dragon-watching in St Louis
- That Lightning’s Hard to Climb
- And Don’t Be Deaf to the Singing Beyond
- Looking Before and After
- Aunt Jewell as Powwow Princess
- When Earth Brings
- In the Suburbs
- A Mandala of Sorts
- In the Changing Light
- Outside in St. Louis
- What the Poet’s Cottage in Tucson Said
- How the Songs Come Down
- Making Money
- Transactions
- Earth and Diamonds
- Amber and Lightning
- Snowflakes, Waterdrops, Time, Eternity and So On
- Unzipping Angels
- Christmas Shopping
- Given
- Liquid Crystal Thoughts
- Sea-changes, Easter 1990
- Law and Order
- Discovery of the New World
- November in Washington, D.C.
- History into Words
- Another Sunday Morning
- Parading with the Veterans of Foreign Wars
- Coming of Age in the County Jail
- Free White and Fifteen
- Firewater
- A Response to Terrorists
- Hamlet and Fortinbras Exchange Pleasantries
- The Biograbbers
- Support your Local Police Dog
- Criminals as Creators of Capital
- Chimes at Midnight
- The Secret Verbs
- On the Planet of Blue-eyed Cats
- A Song That We Still Sing
- Starring America
- 1. To The Eastern Shores of Light
- 2. New York, With Reservations
- 3. On The Reservation
- Over There
- Advice from Euterpe
- Jetliner from Angel City
- Where the Muses Haunt
- The Swan’s Song
- Pilotless Angel: Christmas, 2004
- Letter to Friends on the Isle of Skye
- Postcolonial Hyperbaggage
- Columbus Looks Out Far, In Deep
- But Still in Israel’s Paths They Shine
- Songs of the Wine-throated Hummingbird
