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Original Fire: Selected and New Poems by Louise Erdrich, Perennial/HarperCollins Publishers. Paper $13.95.

Review by Tom Pynn

It has been twenty-one years since the publication of Louise Erdrich’s first book of poems, Jacklight (1984), and sixteen years since her second Baptism of Desire (1989). Though known mostly for her novels and nonfiction, Erdrich has remained one of those rare writers whose voice effortlessly shifts shape, is not confined by habit or memory to any one particular form. Yet, whether novel or poem, we find that Erdrich’s themes remain consistent: the cross-cultural references of living in two worlds (Euro-American and Ojibwe); the tensions, creative and destructive, between males and females as well as generations; and the experiences of immanence and transcendence, the ambiguous life of the body in its naturalness, violence, sensuality, and as a vehicle for liberation.

The selection of poems from her first two books allow us to reacquaint ourselves with the double-edged theme of resistance to cultural and physical genocide, on the one hand, and resistance to the loss of key elements of an indigenous worldview on the other, both crucial to contemporary Native American literature in general, and Erdrich’s poetry in particular. The forced removal (read “ethnic cleansing”) of native children to boarding schools from reservations in order that the cultural traces—language, dress, hair—is recalled in “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways”: “Home’s the place we head for in our sleep . . .. / remembering / delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves.” In the oft-anthologized “Dear John Wayne,” we are reminded that the Indian wars still rage, that “there will be no parlance . . . / It is / not over, this fight, not as long as you resist.” Though never reported in the current pages of The New York Times or Washington Post, Indian country is where the enemy lives.

Just as there are the poems of negative resistance, the early volumes abound with elements of indigenous life that can ameliorate the history of broken treaties, fatal loves and losses. The prominence of humor in Native American cultures appears in the Potchikoo poems, a blending of humor with Ojibwe mythology, stories that educate, heal and entertain that call for and reinforce endurance. Central to endurance is acknowledgement of and participation in the overlapping worlds of spirits, humans, and animals. In Erdrich’s poems, as well as in Amerindian literature generally, things are often not what they seem. The body exists not only as a limiting situation, but as a medium of transformation that often leads into humorous situations or, just as likely, into “desire / in love with its private ruin.”

In her new poems subtitled as “Original Fire,” the themes that we have come to associate with Erdrich’s work have gained depth and refinement showing that she ought to be as acclaimed for her poetry as she is for her fiction. The series “Asinig” is the anchor of the sixteen new poems. The author tells us in the poem’s epigraph that “the Ojibwe word for stone, asin, is animate. Stones are alive.” Thus, the poem is spoken from the perspective of the stones that predate the arrival of humans and “allowed [humans] to occur. We are still deciding whether that was / wise.” The poem is a sobering reminder of our contingency, responsibility, and most importantly, our connection to the living universe and our emergence out of “the original fire which formed us.” “Asinig” speaks in the bardic voice urging us to see things as they are—“to see a thing so perfectly what it is.” Distracted by a potent brew of selfishness as a virtue, Enlightenment techno-economic promises and theological claptrap, we have been persuaded, among other things, to destroy our natural inheritance—less than 4% of original forests remain on this continent. Whether or not indigenous peoples have anything to offer us in our desire for redemption I can’t say, but in “The Sweat Lodge” the stones say “when you break yourselves open-- / that is how the healing continues.”

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