Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light
Fifty Poems for Fifty Years
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A magnificent selection of fifty poems to celebrate three-term US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s fifty years as a poet.
Over a long, influential career in poetry, Joy Harjo has been praised for her “warm, oracular voice” (John Freeman, Boston Globe) that speaks “from a deep and timeless source of compassion for all” (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR). Her poems are musical, intimate, political, and wise, intertwining ancestral memory and tribal histories with resilience and love.
In this gemlike volume, Harjo selects her best poems from across fifty years, beginning with her early discoveries of her own voice and ending with moving reflections on our contemporary moment. Generous notes on each poem offer insight into Harjo’s inimitable poetics as she takes inspiration from Navajo horse songs and jazz, reckons with home and loss, and listens to the natural messengers of the earth. As evidenced in this transcendent collection, Joy Harjo’s “poetry is light and elixir, the very best prescription for us in wounded times” (Sandra Cisneros, Millions).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harjo's patient guidance, mastery of form, and emotional depth are on dazzling display in these 50 poems drawing from 50 years of her poetry career. Her sensitivity toward the human experience is everywhere evident, especially in "Bird" (for jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker), in which she writes, "I've always had a theory that some of us/ are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies," arriving at an indelible insight: "All poets/ understand the final uselessness of words. We are chords to/ other chords to other chords, if we're lucky, to melody." She revisits this idea in "Creation Story," remarking, "I am ashamed/ I never had the words/ to carry a friend from her death/ to the stars/ correctly.// Or the words to keep/ my people safe/ from drought/ or gunshot." "Eagle Poem" captures Harjo's interest in the natural world and cycles, opening, "To pray you open your whole self/ To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon/ To one whole voice that is you." Harjo connects the human family, and the earthly and spiritual realms, in poems that sparkle with generosity and brilliance.
