Song of the Sky: Versions of Native American Song-Poems [Paperback]

BRIAN SWANNis professor of English at Cooper Union. He is the author of many works of fiction, poetry, and poetry-in-translation and editor of four volumes on Native American literature.

Swann's concrete renderings of the poems are visually striking and are meant to embody the notions of silence and cycle that are so important in Native American culture. . . . [He] does a fine job of encouraging readers to return to return to these original songs and poems from a culture that most latter-day Americans know far too little about.Anne Bromley,Georgia Review

Based on the work of anthropologist collectors, this compendium of more than 100 Native American chants and songs revises and updates a prior edition out of print since 1989. These poems are not translations, argues Swann. They're versions that have gone through a series of mediations and filters and exist somewhere between the individual lyric voice and a diverse, multileveled Native American imaginative-mystical identity. Whether versions, translations, or poems, whether sung at a Crazy Dance, potlatch, corn-grinding, or curative or marriage ceremony, whether celebrating buffalo, maize, red fox, or tobacco, these works capture the otherness of the primeval spirit of the Native American fusion of natural and supernatural, animal and deity. Originally performed aloud, these verbal artifactswhich are sometimes breathtakingly pure, sometimes obscurereveal that there can be no conventional or single notion of the Indian.Library Journal