From the Publisher
"The 100 poems and short sketches . . . are as simple and complex as our collective existence. . . . Each is a small gem, a glass seed that is part of the pattern on a piece of Native beadwork: By itself it has its own character and texture, its own beauty and completeness. Woven or sewn into the pattern created by the artist, the individual beads together anchor the art and become the design that tells the larger story." — Minneapolis Star Tribune
“The iconic Kiowa writer. . . [draws] deeply from dreams, fantasies, personal remembrance, and the wellspring of Native American spirituality to dissolve distinctions between the real and the surreal. . . . Bite-size snacks for the metaphysical appetite.” — Kirkus
"Add another entry of mystical lyrics to the still-expanding oeuvre of prolific Kiowa folklorist, novelist, and illustrator Momaday. . . . The book's long view and even pace bring out the best insights of this octogenarian's flourishing career." — Booklist
"Momaday’s poems are rich with description, lush with dreaming, and filled with magic. Essential for Indigenous collections and highly recommended for poetry lovers generally." — Library Journal (starred review)
"A collection that celebrates language, invention, humanity, and the natural world." — Publishers Weekly
"We couldn’t imagine a better soundtrack for a thoughtful weekend walk down whatever dream-like springtime trails you might have at hand." — Paste Magazine (on the audiobook of Dream Drawings)
"In many ways, to read Momaday is to read the land. It is to encounter the earth alive with wind and sunlight, with plants and animals, and to know all of it—each aspect of the world—by name. It is also to renew a reverence for beauty and a feeling of hope." — Stanford Magazine
Stanford Magazine
"In many ways, to read Momaday is to read the land. It is to encounter the earth alive with wind and sunlight, with plants and animals, and to know all of it—each aspect of the world—by name. It is also to renew a reverence for beauty and a feeling of hope."
Paste Magazine (on the audiobook of Dream Drawings)
"We couldn’t imagine a better soundtrack for a thoughtful weekend walk down whatever dream-like springtime trails you might have at hand."
Booklist
"Add another entry of mystical lyrics to the still-expanding oeuvre of prolific Kiowa folklorist, novelist, and illustrator Momaday. . . . The book's long view and even pace bring out the best insights of this octogenarian's flourishing career."
Library Journal
★ 07/01/2022
A consummate storyteller whose works include many novels, plays, and poems, Pulitzer Prize—winning Kiowa author Momaday follows up 2020's Earth Keeper and The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems with a collection of 100 prose poems along with drawings by the author. Each piece blends seamlessly with what precedes and follows, and readers will find themselves inside the dream of these poems, held under the spell of turning the page. Momaday has created his own mythology here, his own world, stating that "language is magical…. We became human when we acquired language." As they encounter spirits and spirit animals—bears, eagles, and witches—they will also find much wisdom: "The story does not end. Rather it revolves on a wheel of telling." Those he pays homage to include Gwendolyn Brooks, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Rumi as he spreads out "a meadow./ On a carpet of colors/ I will meet you there." VERDICT Momaday's poems are rich with description, lush with dreaming, and filled with magic. Essential for Indigenous collections and highly recommended for poetry lovers generally.—Karla Huston
Kirkus Reviews
2022-03-01
The iconic Kiowa writer offers an assemblage of parables, poems, vignettes, and a few stark drawings, with the thematic underpinning that all stories are part of a larger universal story.
Momaday (b. 1934), winner of a Pulitzer Prize and numerous lifetime achievement awards, is acclaimed for his work as a fiction writer, poet, and essayist, often blurring the boundaries among categories. In this follow-up to Earth Keeper, the author pretty much obliterates those categories, drawing deeply from dreams, fantasies, personal remembrance, and the wellspring of Native American spirituality to dissolve distinctions between the real and the surreal. “I have heard the thunder of King Lear’s voice on the boards of the Globe Theatre in Elizabethan London,” he writes. “I was spellbound. Emily Dickinson read to me a poem she had written about crickets in which she realized a precision of statement that defies description.” Momaday suggests that if you have dreamed it, you have lived it, and that the you or I of whom you are conscious might itself be a dream. We see these ideas at work in “Dreaming Bear Speaks,” one of the many short narratives in which bears appear—usually not threatening, sometimes dreaming. “Perhaps he dreams of me dreaming of him,” writes the author. “He dreams of being me, of being human.” Night and day, dreams and awakening, fact and fantasy: The boundaries contained therein seem porous throughout these pieces, which combine elements of the fantastical and the matter-of-fact. Despite the title, there aren’t that many drawings, and they appear as representational inkblots, suggesting a tree or a crow or a human visage. The illustrations punctuate the narratives and underscore their thematic unity, but the narratives themselves also have a sketchlike quality—drawings with words. Momaday concludes that these pieces “are random and self-contained, and they are the stuff of story, and story is a nourishment of the soul.” Most spiritually open-minded readers will agree.
Bite-size snacks for the metaphysical appetite.
