Off the Reservation

Among the Dog Eaters, poems by Adrian Louis   $9.95,  West End Press,  Box 27334,   Albuquerque, NM 87125,   ISBN: 0-931122-69-4

Curiously, Adrian C. Louis' poetry from deep within the world of the Oglala Lakota reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota signals that his poetry is a leap out of the confines of any literary ghetto that might limit praise for what he has accomplished by labeling it “Indian.” It is Indian, but it is more. Leslie Silko's Ceremony, with its formal integrity and the demands of reader-response tied to Native American myth and ritual, forced critics to acknowledge it, without limiting it by calling it an Indian novel, as one of the finest novels of recent years. Among the Dog Eaters does the same thing for Indian poetry. This is one of the finest books of poems of recent years.

This second book by Louis (his first won the Book Award from the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University) is, in the best sense of the word, Language poetry. His poetry strains against the fake, the imposed, the colonizing language of the dominant culture as it struggles to control the authentic, free, or striving-to-be-free, language of the body. The first poem, "Notes From Indian Country," juxtaposes the disembodied language of the oppressor at "An adjectival all-staff meeting at the Indian college" where he is "forced to listen to a professional / storyteller" against the response of his friend "Verdell / who let a silent onion fart."

"Red Blues in a White Town the Day We Bomb Iraqi Women and Children" is one of the most appropriate poems written in response to that particular atrocity. The poem ends: "Long distance killers with college degrees / swooped down from heaven / on high tech wings. / They pushed painless buttons / and a sand tribe's blood splashed up / to white clouds / to blue sky / to God/s face." And, finally, Louis has written one of the most memorable poems I've ever read: "Christmas Carol For The Severed Head of Mangus Coloradas." There's plenty left to say, but anyone reading this review should read this book as a prolegomena to some straight talk about contemporary poetry.

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