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Angle of geese and other poems
Book by Momaday, N. Scott
- GenresPoetry
28 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
About the author
N. Scott Momaday
72 books581 followersN. Scott Momaday's baritone voice booms from any stage. The listener, whether at the United Nations in New York City or next to the radio at home, is transported through time, known as 'kairos"and space to Oklahoma near Carnegie, to the "sacred, red earth" of Momaday's tribe.
Born Feb. 27, 1934, Momaday's most famous book remains 1969's House Made of Dawn, the story of a Pueblo boy torn between the modern and traditional worlds, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and was honored by his tribe. He is a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society. He is also a Regents Professor of Humanities at the University of Arizona, and has published other novels, memoir, plays and poetry. He's been called the dean of American Indian writers, and he has influenced other contemporary Native American writers from Paula Gunn Allen to Louise Erdrich.
Momaday views his writings, published in various books over the years, as one continuous story. Influences on his writing include literature of America and Europe and the stories of the Kiowa and other tribal peoples.
"Native Americans have a unique identity," Momaday told Native Peoples Magazine in 1998. "It was acquired over many thousands of years, and it is the most valuable thing they have. It is their essence and it must not be lost."
Momaday founded The Buffalo Trust in the 1990s to keep the conversations about Native American traditions going. He especially wanted to give Native American children the chance to getting to know elders, and he wanted the elders to teach the children the little details of their lives that make them uniquely Native American. Once the Buffalo Trust arranged for Pueblo children to have lesson from their elders in washing their hair with yucca root as their ancestors did for as long as anyone can remember.
"In the oral tradition," Momaday has said, "stories are not told merely to entertain or instruct. They are told to be believed. Stories are realities lived and believed."
Born Feb. 27, 1934, Momaday's most famous book remains 1969's House Made of Dawn, the story of a Pueblo boy torn between the modern and traditional worlds, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and was honored by his tribe. He is a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society. He is also a Regents Professor of Humanities at the University of Arizona, and has published other novels, memoir, plays and poetry. He's been called the dean of American Indian writers, and he has influenced other contemporary Native American writers from Paula Gunn Allen to Louise Erdrich.
Momaday views his writings, published in various books over the years, as one continuous story. Influences on his writing include literature of America and Europe and the stories of the Kiowa and other tribal peoples.
"Native Americans have a unique identity," Momaday told Native Peoples Magazine in 1998. "It was acquired over many thousands of years, and it is the most valuable thing they have. It is their essence and it must not be lost."
Momaday founded The Buffalo Trust in the 1990s to keep the conversations about Native American traditions going. He especially wanted to give Native American children the chance to getting to know elders, and he wanted the elders to teach the children the little details of their lives that make them uniquely Native American. Once the Buffalo Trust arranged for Pueblo children to have lesson from their elders in washing their hair with yucca root as their ancestors did for as long as anyone can remember.
"In the oral tradition," Momaday has said, "stories are not told merely to entertain or instruct. They are told to be believed. Stories are realities lived and believed."
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 14, 2020
This is a lovely little book with some really good poems in it. I found Plainview: 2 especially powerful.
January 2, 2023
Through the local library, I was able to read an eBook version of this early collection of Momaday's poems.
September 7, 2008
"Disconnected" might be the one word review of this short volume of poetry by N. Scott Momaday. I felt no sense of cohesiveness--neither in this amalgamation of poems nor between the poet and his voice. Inchoate as this volume may be, anyone less talented than N. Scott Momaday may have completely failed in the effort, but the old soul manages a few of his shining jewels, as in the debouchment of Pit Viper:
The cordate head meanders through himself:
Metamorphosis. Slowly the new thing,
Kindled to flares along his length, curves out.
There is something genuinely viseceral coiled in his stylistic ellipsis here. Still, other poems are opaque simply for the sake of form and ring hollow--as in this line from the preceeding poem Buteo Regalis, which sketches a bat in erradic flight, "His frailty discrete, the rodent turns, looks." I was pulled from the text by that ambiguous utilization of "discrete," and wished I could buy old N. Scott a beer and say, "Hey, N... what's this about 'frailty being discrete?' Not to be curmudgeon, but did you mean discreet? And, even then... what? Besides, how exactily does a bat 'look' if it's blind?" Those kinds of things. I mean, regardless there's a lot at work in a poem; so the ever intractable reader must be coaxed into the non-partisan space of brief infinity, which exists somewhere between the eyes and the page or further between the mind and the words... Momaday achieves this in fits and starts through this volume, but the disconnect follows swiftly.
The cordate head meanders through himself:
Metamorphosis. Slowly the new thing,
Kindled to flares along his length, curves out.
There is something genuinely viseceral coiled in his stylistic ellipsis here. Still, other poems are opaque simply for the sake of form and ring hollow--as in this line from the preceeding poem Buteo Regalis, which sketches a bat in erradic flight, "His frailty discrete, the rodent turns, looks." I was pulled from the text by that ambiguous utilization of "discrete," and wished I could buy old N. Scott a beer and say, "Hey, N... what's this about 'frailty being discrete?' Not to be curmudgeon, but did you mean discreet? And, even then... what? Besides, how exactily does a bat 'look' if it's blind?" Those kinds of things. I mean, regardless there's a lot at work in a poem; so the ever intractable reader must be coaxed into the non-partisan space of brief infinity, which exists somewhere between the eyes and the page or further between the mind and the words... Momaday achieves this in fits and starts through this volume, but the disconnect follows swiftly.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews