Seven Hands, Seven Hearts: Prose and Poetry

by Elizabeth Woody, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Illustrator)

"Her poems are like hands and hearts and also like they grip and pulse and illuminate. Like the woman herself, the work is grand and modest and forceful. It will shake you, and move you deeply."-- The Bloomsbury Review "Woody follows in the tradition of peoples who have understood the power of language, and the place of a poet/singer/storyteller at the center of the world."-- Joy Harjo

Genres: Poetry, Native American

192 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

Elizabeth Woody s an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in Oregon. She also descends from the Navajo, Wasco, and Yakama peoples.

She was a recipient for the 1990 American Book Award for her book Hand into Stone from the Before Columbus Foundation. In 1993, she also Elizabeth received a "Medicine Pathways for the Future" Fellowship/Kellogg Fellowship from the American Indian Ambassadors Program of the Americans for Indian Opportunity.

She is a recipient of the William Stafford Memorial Award for Poetry from the Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Association and was a finalist in the Oregon Book Awards in poetry in 1995.

Reviews

[Alison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tender and imaginative prose. Stark and conceptual poetry. A lively and inspiring introduction by the author.

[Ian Diez · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Eat, Granma, we have plenty for many lifetimes over.”

[T.L. Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seven Hands Seven Hearts: Prose and Poetry by Elizabeth Woody surprised me by pulling me in to the poems and the prose time and again. At times I felt like a voyeur gazing into a place I didn't belong but felt drawn to. Woody uses her history, her ancestral heritage, and modernity to paint a picture of a society within a society that pulled at my heart in ways I didn't expect. Seven Hands Seven Hearts pushed me to rethink my place in the world and way the world around me works. Looking into the past to understand the present and even project into a possible future, Seven Hands Seven Hearts unapologetically explores the differences and the similarities of the peoples who inhabit the world in which we all exist.

[David Grosskopf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elizabeth Woody is Yakama, Wasco, Warm Springs and Navajo. This book of prose and poetry starts with great love and youth and ends with -- I think an earlier book of poems -- destruction and darkness.

The prose I found more compelling than the poetry, but the feelings here are captured beautifully, especially around the damming of the Columbia River in 1957. Pieces I want to use in the future are the introduction (11-16), "Buckskin" (21-24), "Remember Our Relatives" (45), "Wyam: Echo of Falling Water" (63-68), "Birds in This Woman" (84-88), and "Our Reverence and Difficult Return" (119-122).

[Autumn Kearney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seven Hands, Seven Hearts is an enjoyable collection written by Native American women in Oregon. It contains three sections. They are: By our hand, through memory, the house is more than form. Seven hands seven hearts. Hand into stone.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Current Oregon Poet Laureate https://oregonpoetlaureate.org/history/

Signed at a COCC reading, I believe.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another author that I had the pleasure of hearing speak at UM. And another autographed book, too. Here are some notes that I took inside the front cover during my initial reading.

Poems: the imagery is beautiful, but takes a while to comprehend. Hard to link the imagery into a coherent whole. Must spend considerable time with each poem, well worth it!

Prose: great, funny, didactic

[Gina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woody's prose stories have a realness and familiarity to them that is good, but there is a kind of awkwardness, with too many words crowding in.

Fortunately more of the book is poetry, her real strength. Lines are fluid and elegant, shimmering and giving glimpses. The verse has a life of its own, often tactile, even sensual, creating vivid impressions. I would seek out more of her work.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poetry has a certain rhythm and pastoral quality to it. Although, they differ from your typical pastoral poem in that it's mixed with Indian mysticism.

I didn't enjoy the prose as much. Although the writing was pretty good and imagistic, I didn't enjoy the stories themselves.

[Graham Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like I know the people of CO a little better. I especially enjoyed the first 3/4th.