Earth Always Endures: Native American Poems

by Neil Philip (Introduction), Edward S. Curtis (Photographer)

This eloquent new anthology gives a vivid insight into the world of Native Americans. The chants, prayers, and songs in these pages vibrate with wisdom, joy, and terrible sadness. Underlying everything is a sense of the sacred - the wish, as one Yokuts poet says, to be "one with the world."
The sixty poems in this collection are accompanied by over forty unforgettable duotone photographs by Edward S. Curtis. This stunning combination of word and image brings us closer than ever before to the heart of Native American traditions.
The poems come from the woodlands, the plains, the deserts, and the pueblos. They speak of love, of war, of the known and the unknowable. Today's flowering of new writing by Native Americans has revived interest in the song traditions that underlie their work. This anthology aims to give a representative selection of the best of those traditions, from Maine to California.

Genres: Poetry, Photography, Native American, Art

96 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1996

About the author

Neil Philip is a writer, folklorist and poet. He is married to the artist Emma Bradford, and lives in the Cotswolds, England. Neil loves words, poetry, and the art of storytelling in all its forms. Among his many books are A Fine Anger, Victorian Village Life, The Cinderella Story, The Penguin Book of English Folktales, Mythology (with Philip Wilkinson), The Great Mystery, War and the Pity of War, The New Oxford Book of Childrens Verse, The Tale of Sir Gawain, Horse Hooves & Chicken Feet, and The Adventures of Odysseus. Neil has contributed to numerous journals, including The Times, and Signal: Approaches to Childrens Books, and has also written for stage, screen, and radio. His work has won numerous awards and honours, including the Aesop Award of the American Folklore Society and the Literary Criticism Book Award of the Childrens Literature Association. Outside of the storied world, Neil is passionate about cats, art, music, France, food & wine, and friendship.

Reviews

[HeatherREADS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moving words. Moving images. Traditional Indigenous poetry from many different American sources.

[Malika-Liki · Rating 5 out of 5]

a wonderful book, read on internet archive.
I loved the Black and White photos of Curtis, and the choice of poem.
A rare book, a bittersweet feeling filled me reading the short poems and watching the photos.
I loved the analogy made with Chinese and japonese poetry. Concise, precise, poetic.

and I am not a fan of poetry.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book. I have never read Native American poetry or songs, but I have taken a course about native Americans of the Southwest and have read anthropological texts and a few creation stories of different tribes. I read this collection during a New Mexico trip (Alamogordo, NM). I would love to look into more information about some of the featured tribes and see if the poems here correlate more closely to their belief systems and mythologies in terms of theme, structure, and repetition.