Fjords Reviews

Poetry
The Death of Sitting Bear
by N. Scott Momaday

HARPER
192 pages
0062961152

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet N. Scott Momaday’s The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems is a gem of a collection that shows a master writing in various formats about a plethora of topics. Despite the variety here, there are some cohesive elements that give the collection a sense of unity and make it a must-read for fans not only of poetry but also of history and biographies.

Momaday has experienced life, which is arguably the first thing someone needs to do in order to produce meaningful literature. The past and the present converge in many of the poems in The Death of Sitting Bear, making this a mixture of celebration of language’s power to hold life, a melancholic chronicle of life, death, and impermanence, and an ode to Sitting Bear, the Kiowa warrior, a man Momaday considers “a formidable man, singular and mysterious, one who exists now in the distance of myth and oral history.”

Of the many elements that make this an outstanding collection, perhaps the use of memory is the one that jumps out at readers as the most obvious. Momaday is concerned with the past, but also recognizes the effect that past has helped shape the present and how sometimes the present is nothing more than a new space to remember that which is now gone. “Shade” is a great example:

“You are present in the past
And appear in memory,
A braid of smoke, a vapor,
And silence is your substance.
You are nothing, Yet you are.
You wend along the way
To a perfect destiny
On a whisper of the wind.”

There is something special about poetry that can touch you with its simplicity and heart. Many of Momadays’ work achieves that. While it comes from a very different place and is rooted in Native American traditions instead of the African American experiences, reading some of the poems in this book made me recall feelings I experienced when reading Langston Hughes’s word over a decade ago. That, simple put is power, and it’s a power Momaday recognizes in “Dictum”:

“If language is the instrument of thought
And one relies on reason as one ought,
Then words hold surely what is seen and sought.”

The power of language, the beauty of simplicity, and the importance of memory/history converge in a two-line poem that embodies everything Momaday does well in this collection. It’s titled “JFK”:

“We wept and could not put our grief aside
And knew is was our innocence that died.”

The first part of the book is a collection of poems about many things brought together by the sporadic appearance of the elements of cohesion mentioned above. This is followed by a section that contains a hundred haikus. While there are no throwaways in this book, it seems Momaday built the collection in a way that it crescendos, and this section elevates the book into another level. The haiku, with its smallness and strictness, has been a vehicle for poets to study life, beauty, and nature for centuries, and Momaday takes on that history with style and deliver a hundred tiny poems that demand to be savored. My favorite, and one that exemplifies what this book holds, is #18: “in the photograph/a black and blue horse bolting/outburst of silence.”

The last section of the book deserves to be called a grand finale. In it, Momaday celebrates Sitting Bear. The section starts with a short prose biography and then turns to poetry to do the same thing but in a richer, deeper way.

“Mine were a people of pilgrimage. On the Great
Plains they followed the arc of the sun. I so
Embraced the meaning of my name. I was brave,
Steadfast, generous, and true. And I excelled;
Honors were placed on me. I led the Kaitsenko,
The band of ten heroes. We owned the death song.
I was known beyond the camps and among enemies.
My medicine was feared, and I taunted death.”

Take together, the sections that make up The Death of Sitting Bear are an outstanding testament to Momaday’s talent; a smart collection of poems that show the importance of recognizing what came before and how we must enjoy and remember because impermanence touches everything. Soulful, heartfelt, beautifully constructed, and technically brilliant, this is a book written by one of our most important and unique voices.