A History of Kindness

by Linda Hogan

"Hogan remains awed and humble in this sweetly embracing, plangent book of grateful, sorrowful, tender poems wed to the scarred body and ravaged Earth."—BOOKLISTCOLORADO BOOK AWARD WINNER OKLAHOMA BOOK AWARD WINNERThroughout this clear–eyed collection, Hogan tenderly excavates how history instructs the present, and envisions a future alive with hope for a healthy and sustainable world that now wavers between loss and survival.A major American writer and the recipient of the 2007 Mountains and Plains Booksellers Spirit of the West Literary Achievement Award, LINDA HOGAN is a Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, teacher, and activist who has spent most of her life in Oklahoma and Colorado. Her fiction has garnered many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination and her poetry collections have received the American Book Award, Colorado Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle nomination. A volunteer and consultant for wildlife rehabilitation and endangered species programs, Hogan has also published essays with the Nature Conservancy and Sierra Club.

Genres: Poetry, Indigenous, Nonfiction, Nature, Native American, Spirituality, Earth

79 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 2, 2020

About the author

Linda K. Hogan (born 1947 Denver) is a Native American poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. She is currently the Chickasaw Nation's Writer in Residence.

Linda Hogan is Chickasaw. Her father is a Chickasaw from a recognized historical family and Linda's uncle, Wesley Henderson, helped form the White Buffalo Council in Denver during the 1950s. It was to help other Indian people coming to the city because of The Relocation Act, which encouraged migration for work and other opportunities. He had a strong influence on her and she grew up relating strongly to both her Chickasaw family in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) and to a mixed Indian community in the Denver area. At other times, her family traveled because of the military.

Her first university teaching position was in American Indian Studies and American Studies at the University of Minnesota. After writing her first book, Calling Myself Home, she continued to write poetry. Her work has both a historical and political focus, but is lyrical. Her most recent books are The Book of Medicines (1993) and Rounding the Human Corners. (2008) She is also a novelist and essayist. Her work centers on the world of Native peoples, from both her own indigenous perspective and that of others. She was a full professor of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado and then taught the last two years in the University's Ethnic Studies Department. She currently is the Writer in Residence for her own Chickasaw Nation.

Essayist, novelist, and poet, Hogan has published works in many different backgrounds and forms. Her concentration is on environmental themes. She has acted as a consultant in bringing together Native tribal representatives and feminist themes, particularly allying them to her Native ancestry. Her work, whether fiction or non-fiction, expresses an indigenous understanding of the world.

She has written essays and poems on a variety of subjects, both fictional and nonfictional, biographical and from research. Hogan has also written historical novels. Her work studies the historical wrongs done to Native Americans and the American environment since the European colonization of North America.

Hogan was a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Oklahoma. She is the (inaugural) Writer-in-Residence for the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. In October 2011, she instructed a writing workshop through the Abiquiu Workshops in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘I am a warrior
wanting this world to survive,
never forgotten…’

In Linda Hogan’s collection, A History of Kindness, she takes a long look at a history filled with colonialism, oppression and death and responds to it with beauty. This is a collection to look up to and learn from, a collection of words that soothe the soul while simultaneously holding the evils that lurk in mankind accountable for their atrocities. There is a tender love to her words--even when they stand powerfully in defiance of oppression--that will shake you to your core. These are poems that give honor to the world, all the animals and plants and landscapes, and press us to be more responsible with them and each other. ‘Power eats the world,” she writes, yet offers a hopeful future if we can listen to the stories of old, learn and speak the name and live sustainably in harmony with the natural world.

‘I want to be more that one brief life
that will become frail, but rather a journey
over plains, glaciers, and oceans,
with people whose language
has no past tense, so we forgive
and continue to tell happy stories
of where we have traveled
beyond this place.’

This passage from Distance Not Time is a perfect reflection on the beautiful softness that permeates this collection. A softness that is as disarming as it is empowering and fills your heart past the point of overflow. A poet that can identify and embody ‘the sweetness of his grief,’ as she writes of a man mourning a woman he never knew. Linda Hogan, is a Chickasaw writer whose work and activism celebrates indigenous culture and sustainable relationships with the environment and these themes echo loud and clear through her poetry. She writes of the animals that grace our world and how even a stone ‘tells the story of what happened here’ to remind us that the natural world speaks in its own language. We just have to find a way to listen.

‘This land, I watch over it,
The place with ancient stories’

Hogan is a natural next step into poetry for the many readers who enjoy Mary Oliver but don’t know where to go next in the poetry world. This is poetry that embodies the natural world and all its joys, but also has a deep message of justice and perseverance in the wake of history. There is a powerful discourse of land stolen and people massacred for power and conquest, there are poems of lost languages and lost children, but in the end this collection feels like a calming and encouraging embrace. As the US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo says 'Hogan's poetry has always been a medicine of sorts.' This is about looking for hope, accepting change, and using that to change the world for the better. This has been an excellent year for new poetry, though this volume may be the one that was most needed to fight the terror of existence in a country full of violent history. Linda Hogan is a gift and a voice that we should all listen to.

4.5/5

‘Even the earth knows these veins
That run like rivers
Of sweet water into countries
Great one day, gone the next,
Or flowing into one
Another to create something new.’

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a collection of poems....but today while resting - staying indoors - windows closed due to the smoky fires all around us - I was reminded of a lovely review by another Goodreads member...s.penkevich.
I immediately was drawn to ‘the title’ ...”A History of Kindness”......[as in *kindness*].

This is my first introduction to Linda Hogan....( the timing of connecting with her verses is fitting with what we are dealing with - the fires - here in Northern California)....
The themes Linda weaves together: body, family, ecology, and animals —-are relevant to what we are facing with our 300 burning fires...with 60,000 people-evacuations.
Linda Hogan underlines the importance of fighting for our planet. She points to the dangers and inspires kindness....empathy.....
compassion......love and hope.....and intentions.

“When I was a girl the old woman told me if I were always generous I could paint a part in the middle of my hair with red.
Red ochre. Red paint. Red lipstick some even used.
But it seemed not right to reveal to the world that I was generous,
As if the announcement takes it back.
So, unlike other girls, I appeared selfish even if I gave so much away.
Who would have known I gave my buckskin dress, my leggings and moccasins, beaded so well, even the silver bands for my hair.
I think of the many red parts, even the parting of the sea by Moses leading his people in a never-ending story, or parting in the red stem of the plant for healing bad lungs, the splitting of the heart when one side works against the other and the veins in their miles flow back again and again.
But the red part I recall the most had to do with the generosity, and then our giving up the taken land and forest to those who wanted it so.
We parted with our clothing, our families, and on our way we left the read farewell of a blood trail along the land we walked, writing that became the book coming after us with words of truth”.

“I am just wishing to take life up from the earth to make this my own living not by the hour, a month, or year.
I don’t want to live by time, but by acre, mile, or maybe the mist stretched over a lake early one morning in the mountains.
I want to be more than one brief life that will become frail, but rather a journey over plains, glaciers, and oceans, with people whose language
has no past tense, so we forgive and continue to tell happy stories where we have traveled beyond this place”.

Beautiful poems....
About
Children, clouds, sunshine, wildflowers, mountains, birds, bisons, hiding places, mothers, fathers, other animals, tiny creatures of earth, trees, valleys, rivers, memories, music, the holy sky, our planet, ancient stories, silence, pearls of wisdom, death, love, and eternity.

“When you walk through fires, you will not be burned”

A lovely graceful collection of poems to embrace and reflect.

Thanks s.penkevich

[Aitana Monzón · Rating 4 out of 5]

“But the red part I recall the most / had to do with generosity, and then / our giving up the taken land and forest / to those who wanted it so.”

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll start with how carefully Weller Book Works packed this to send it to me. Then the craft that Torrey House Press put into the book, the more substantial-than-usual cover, the heft and deep cream of the pages.
From one favorite poem, " The Pine Forest Calls Me"
I remember one poet taking a branch of pine
from the winter forest to his dying sister.
It was all she wanted in her last moment.
I have never forgotten the snow dripping
from that branch to the floor.

[Madison · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems were all worth reading, but I wasn't blown away by many of them. They were very much a celebration of life, a call to eco-justice, and a reminder of the history that the colonizers buried -- the voices of a people who were pushed from their own land to watch it be exploited & destroyed for profit. A lot of the collection has a sort of Romantic sensibility to it--a poet-speaker who appears to be Linda herself, sharing her daily experiences walking through / being present in nature, pointing to the ways that we worship in nature, acting as a wise poet-sage to lead the people.

My favorites in the collection were "The Red Part," "The Pine Forest Calls Me," "Walking by Stolen Creek," "Memory," "We Used to Have Pearls," "Holly Springs, Mississippi," "God of the Prairies," "Remember," "Sweet Silence," "Fences," and "Tulsa."

[Rae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chickasaw. Creation. Burying a horse. A blind cat. Good for the soul.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her latest book of poetry (2020), a beautiful collection so far. I am reading them very slowly, one at a time often days apart, picking the book up and opening it to a random page, so I am getting them in no pre-determined order, unless you count fate, of course. :-)

[Mariella Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a little bit in love with this collection. Of all the poetry I've read in the last few years, this is definitely in the top five, possibly in the top two. There's a heart and body to this collection that I don't often see, even in truly enjoyable poetry.

A History of Kindness is not a book that can be explained in a few words any more than it could be explained in many. Composed of five sections— “The Body Life,” “The Old Mother,” “The Radiant Field,” “The Other Country,” and “The Current Veins”—Hogan’s collection weaves a brilliant correlation of truth and lore, past and present, pain and tenderness, to guide the reader toward the idea that we can create in ourselves and our land a kinder future. Hogan, a Chickasaw author, writes of both far and recent past in her poems successfully drawing together images of the creation of the world, Moses and the Red Sea, the Trail of Tears, and the growth of ivy through a childhood fence to present to the reader an inclusive desire for wholeness.

An image that she often returns to is that of the body—how each piece of history informs the choices that create our steps forward, just as each system of the body informs and guides the next. One of my favorite poems in the collection is entitled, “The Red Part.” It describes a coming-of-age custom for young women in which they are entitled to use certain colors of paint in their hair to signify the type of person they have become.

In Hogan’s portrayal of this custom, a red part in one’s hair defines that person as being generous. The poem dictates the back-and-forth ideals of generosity and selfishness, false humility and true loyalty, guiding the reader on a journey through the gains and losses of the Native American people. She shares how, just like the mind leaves a trail of learned reactions and reminders for the body, the history of the actions taken and choices made in the past informs the cultural wounds and unease of the present.

However, Hogan does not stop there. In this poem, the ending may yet be sorrowful, for Hogan writes, “We parted with our clothing, / our families, and on our way/ we left the red farewell/ of a blood trail along the land/ we walked, / writing that became/ the book coming after us/ with words of truth.” But, in other poems, Hogan grants us reminders for a hopeful future, reminders that while the past informs the present—neither dictate the future. She pleads with her readers to “be like the animal that opens hardness/ and carries inside a pearl or a goddess/ that steps out to a new human accord.”

Well...you didn't come here to see me ramble on and on and start mini dissertations, I'm afraid I've certainly left one. Whoops.

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry recommendation: A History Of Kindness by Linda Hogan. As the title of this book suggests, many of these poems has some sort of element of kindness, gratitude or a feeling of connection. The poems hold empathy. That connection for Hogan, a Chickasaw poet, is with nature, heritage and history. And in plain language, she creates all sorts of wonders with her language. Each section focuses on something different. I love how Hogan writes about body image and the connection to her past and beloved family members. I also love the way she can find small moments of kindness and turn them into poems, like when a deer gently rests its head on her. Not all the poems are happy, however. There are reckonings with violent pasts. Police brutality. And a poem about burying her beloved horse. Even in these tone shifts I see some insight about how Hogan views the world. I think there’s a lot we can learn from her.

[mumtaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

such a beautiful, poignant, reflective journey through Hogan's inner and outer worlds (and their convergence). very grateful I was transported through this journey into states of meditation, joy, grief, and hope <3

(she ate btw)

[Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We speak of the past
in present tense because it is
that skin close, blood and fingernail scratch close.”

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This life of mine may be humble, but is rich in love, trees, and waters…I am in love with this land, the animals, all the growing life and the water passing through here, with the trees speaking in the wind outside the windows…Thank you Home, Land, Soil, Trees, and History.”
—Linda Hogan, Koihouma, Chickasaw Old Turtle Clan

These poems accompany on my path of trying to think indigenously like Doug Good Feather asked, and to learn to be indigenous to this place as Robin Wall Kimmerer asks, and tie into reading Circe this year and even Edna St. Vincent Millay who also has a poem named Recuerdo. Vine Deloria in his seminal God is Red talks about the religion the land engender and creates, and I see it now. I used to think, in a more literal way, that the Christian God should have been left back where Christianity began, and that is part of what he says, that it can’t thrive here, that no transplanted religion can; but it is not that the American Indian views of the Creator prevent it from happening, but that the land and place create its own and looking and listening for it is all you have to do. It takes no books or prophets, really, but there are sages and wisdom poets like Linda Hogan to guide the way when you need it.

I sense that Hogan’s life has been filled with trauma, and my heart breaks that she is the most kind poet I have ever encountered, and inspires us to be kind and witness her pain, the truth of what was done to American Indians from the government, and the wisdom here, everywhere, ours for the learning. The European colonizers were not kind, but the poet still sings of a history of kindness that is her song, and I am so grateful to hear it. It is steeped and percolated through the nature I revere, and I will strive to hear this call:

“The fingers have their own aims,
to make beauty, to touch softly something to live by.
In the distance between hand and soul
lies the history of this continent.”

When the Body

When the body wishes to speak, she will
reach into the night and pull back the rapture of this growing root
which has no faith in the other planets of the universe,
but her feet have walked in the same bones of the ancestors
over long trails, leaving behind the oldest forest.

The body is so finely a miracle of its own,
created of the elements of anything
that lived on earth
where everything that was
still is.

About Myself

I come from a land once plenty.
I came from the caves of a world,
and tall grasses where earth rises
and falls as the ribs of a body,
bones all in their hiding, but also
as water rises and falls like breath
with salt water tides following the phases of moon.

Lost in the Milky Way

Some of us are like trees
that grow with a spiral grain
as if already prepared for the
path of the spirit’s journey to
the world of all souls.

This is only the first of our cosmic maps. There is another
my people made of what is farther beyond
this galaxy. It is a world that can’t be imagined by usual means.
After the first, it could be a map of forever.
It is a cartography shining only at certain times of the year like
a great web of finery some spider pulled from
herself to help you recall your true following, your first breath in the dark cold.

From between stars are the words we now refuse;
loneliness, longing, whatever suffering might follow
your life into the sky. Once those are gone, the life
you had against your own will, the hope, even the
prayers take you one more bend around that river of sky.

What We Kept

We had mountains
and you took down
the trees so that rain
felled the mountains.
It was once enchanted
with the song of golden
winds, the silk thread of river,
pollen from the medicine flowers you took.

The more you took,
the more you lost.
And you need us now
the way you needed
us then, our land and labor,
and we give to you
knowledge you don’t hear,
the new mind you can’t accept,
But what I keep to myself, for myself,
is the soul you can never have that
belongs to this land, the magic haunting
you still and always untaken,
but you want, how you want,
how you need.

Recuerdo

Let me take it through my heart again,
that unchanging moment,
you wading through the river,
me wading toward you, laughing,
the illumination of that moment,
the shine of our skin,
the clouds coming toward us,
the sky beings who live above
with tears ready to fall like the origins of rain;
shining like a constant, ceaseless stream of water
as it crawls across earth changing and passes
blood memory, salt water memory, toward our
laughter and joy that moves once again through this heart.

The Feet and Where They Travel

Let me start with my feet. One holds a curved
and graceful line for the loving artist’s eye to follow,
a warm hand to touch.

Down from the Sky

I live here in the forest.
I try to warm myself with wood
from broken earth, thankful to
look out on this tribal land where
we were the nightmares of others,
savages of spiritual wisdom
come from dreamers
and those who prayed to makers,
to creators, to earth mothers and
to water in different languages,
speaking, hoping with such
intelligent words this world
would never fall. Just think,
what we did rise from, after all,
To reach this place,
And how do I find it
Still whole.

The Fingers, Writing

The hands have their reasons
unknown to the heart,
a needed touch,
the kindness of another skin.

The fingers have their own aims,
to make beauty, to touch softly something to live by.
In the distance between hand and soul
lies the history of this continent.

Creation

I am from a line of songs,
a piece of history told by our people.
In every gully lies the power of a forest song
waiting to begin, the first ones sang when they crossed into this existence
and down to the canyon where I live.
I dreamed they passed the creek-bed,
each canyon wall, the stones I love,
lichens growing on them,
the route I go to the river where bear also fish.
It is hard for some to know the world is a living being.

The Pine Forest Calls Me

I remember how it has grown these years.
Yet the spring pinecones are still young,
soft and gentle as skin to the touch.
It is always the green season here,
even with future amber formed golden
from bark with the scent of animal life
that passed through. If a traveler
should pass by, it summons,
Stop, come in, stay…
It is what I want, too,
for myself to be taken to this world
my own life passed through as it does now
in the shadows where sun filters in to melt snow,
quench earth, that water dripping from trees.

How I love this forest,
where the hieroglyphs
of insects work the inner
layers of bark like monks
writing unseen in deep silence,
and if you know the true secret of
falling you might summon that magic language.

Embodied

I am embodied
first by the numbers
given my grandparents as,
trembling, they signed the Dawes Act.
Outside under the moving night sky
I wonder what it is to be made
of this continent from the beginning.
I came from the salt and water
of those before me before the
creation of zero, and then those
numbers given my grandparents
by the American government
and names that belonged to others.
The past we have not forgotten.
They said you only pass on the
people’s story by telling it.
You keep it by giving it away.
So I do. For children of this land,
yesterday is close as today.

Walking by Stolen Creek

The meaning of its name forgotten,
the word remembered.
Whatever happened here is recalled
in another time and it’s remembered
inside the stolen self that my blood
river passes through in thin and beautiful veins,
not gold but only a mere human heartbeat,
a circle of people standing, talking, making
their plans as water passes by.
Something, someone is still alive,
telling. They think these are only
stories not what holds the world
together in its balance.

Old Mother

Sitting on the large stone Old Mother says,
I feel it breathing. And it is, as if she opened
the world life where everything does
breathe like the waves of far ocean
taking in air, giving out the cloud waters
passing over us right now.
The bison breathed this air, she says,
and people from other nations.
Don’t you hear it
all singing, even the stars above
hidden by daylight, the waters beneath us,
and the first cry of your children when they arrive
from the birth waters to air.
She is the one
showing a way
as she points her feather.
Every path is right, she says.
It matters not which one you follow,
just breathe and sing as you
pass along, loving every other traveler.

Watching Over

This land, I watch over it,
the place with ancient stories,
the plants of medicine, the place
where mountain lions walk down the hill
and look in on the light of my life
in this little cabin made of happiness,
of stone laid on stone so perfectly
a hundred years ago, the year
before my father was born.
In this valley of trees and river
and crystal, the fault lines of history broke.

Distance Not Time

I am just wishing to take life up from the earth
to make this my own living
not by the hour, the month, or year.
I don’t want to live by time,
but by acre, mile, or maybe the mist stretched over a lake
early one morning in the mountains.
I want to be more than one brief life
that will become frail, but rather a journey
over plains, glaciers, and oceans,
with people whose language
has no past tense, so we forgive
and continue to tell happy stories
of where we have traveled
beyond this place.
But before I am able to tell this to children
a spring breeze comes from far
through the open window
carrying the smell of sage and sweet grass.
So now I need you to know the mystery,
that neither of these grow here, not in this place.

God of the Prairies

What name is the god of the prairies,
in this place so large and humble, so filled with medicines
and even the tunneling creatures of earth
being the ones who call down rain.
Beneath this richness are rivers, a lake underneath.
Children, that water below was what I wished for you,
more water than remains,
here where no one of us is superior
to the minions of insects, the butterflies
coming to the plants, the wealth of wings,
and at the golden march, the flash of red.
I was born to this,
singing or telling a story to tall grasses,
the horses, alive and listening as they are,
and evening hearing the past dark thunder
of bison running down the distance
fighting back their hooves.
This land is honest, at least,
and the other creatures never lie,
all those many gods of the prairie,
here, in this place, and the stand of trees
down near the river, trees not yet cut,
so no drought there,
not yet.

The Writing of Snow

Snow is a book of history
writing its new language,
changed moment by moment,
but I read the tracks I find before the wind.
Here a flatness passes through
with claw marks on each side,
the tail of a beaver that slipped into the water
that wishes not to be petrified as ice
so the currents turn it crystal instead,
ice in beautiful turrets,
formations of geology,
layered, some old, some deep.
The story is newly changed
each day as I come read the tracks of the living,
bobcat, deer prints like punctuation,
and wonder, like the mysteries in a human,
what creatures, what songs, what countries,
swim beneath it all, or above and the sky...

The Long Clouds

Once I swam through one of these
beneath the earth, inside another element.
At times clear light came from above
into the blue world that nurtures
the curve of this earth returning to itself,
like the rainbow serpent holding itself
Called down by trees, fallen through the
leaves of rainforest back to earth,
pulled up through roots,
up through the canopy are long clouds
of the world, long clouds becoming
water to be carried over the dunes.
How we all want love, even the waters,
so let them be healthy and clean,
let us be carried alive on the water of a planet,
along with it,
not just by it,
but for it.

Home on the Island

The wind in this country is magic
with its history as the element
that drove men to the seas, lost
on islands, and if they found home,
they left it again. That’s when I see
the house on the island,
alone in its water wilderness
of the unseen beneath,
unknown fishes swimming
I could call it home, this tiny island in the wind.
Perhaps it is the evergreens or black stone,
the walkway of wooden sticks that
seem afloat from here to there in the
wind-curling water. I ask my friend,
Could you live on the sea that way?
He says, It’s wonderful.
Maybe I will meet Circe one day. I think,
What about the singing at the loom
and the men who were transformed?
But beneath this walk, the fish,
the small octopus. You know I can’t help
but feel something that alive inside.
All my lives could be here.

Sky Above a Crumbling World

And still the sky so beautifully deep,
clouds so constantly changing.
The fluid language of the past
still crosses above the world,
and an ancient ocean dwells
around each sacred land,

River Singing

We rained from the water of our mothers,
born to the river passages of each life.
We grew up from the cradle of a river,
the sweetness of the taste of spring when rains arrive
and the river enters trees in the first turn of green,
our lifeblood traveling
to the unknown bends of tomorrow.
Tributaries, arteries, veins, we are the river,
sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing
in this brief life and we can’t help it but we love
other waters, opening glorious into one another.
The world, the waterways we are travel in ways
you can’t tell from others. The heart of earth
beats gently, but the song of a river is carried
even under the ground, its own heart set on
great ocean waters. Some days I wonder
how anyone is content on plains, on mountains,
but then doesn’t water live everywhere beneath
our feet as it journeys from one holy site to another?

To Be Held

To be held
by the light
was what I wanted,
to be a tree drinking the rain,
no longer parched in this hot land.
To be roots in a tunnel growing
but also to be sheltering the inborn leaves
and the green slide of mineral
down the immense distances
into infinite comfort and the land here, only clay,
still contains and consumes
the thirsty need
the way a tree always shelters
the unborn life and waits for the
healing after the
storm which has been our life.

Water Gods of the Next World

This is a time when I wonder if we did truly enter the fourth world
as they say, or if that time is yet to come, because we entered
this world for peace. I ask the man whose teachers are clouds;
they live in caves and mountains. They live in thick forests and
some of them come out through broken windows of houses
made with round stones. Others come from the crashing waters
where seas converge, the Pacific and Atlantic with the Southern.
Cloud teachers and water sages wear white. Sometimes
they live with the world of birds. When they pass over this world,
they see suffering and they weep rain. The good man tells me,
If you climb the peaks, sometimes you hear them singing.

Clouds are people I don’t know except they are mostly
humble crossing our sky. Still, I want to know if we have
yet another realm to enter, to emerge from our ways of living now,
to climb a reed, or leave our crystal cave. I thought the goddesses
of clouds and gods of rain were merely the breath of wind, but
some are the story of storms held back too long from telling
they’ve seen how hard the world has grown. In the beginning,
before there were flower people, before bees, were birds and sky.

There was no land. Birds rested on water held by clouds.
For others, a miraculous spirit was born in the presence of animals,
like the rest of the poor with an earth but no clean water to drink.
Tree Woman arrived. She planted and rooted and changed
the course of water so life could go on without illness.
For this they were grateful. These are only a few of the stories
and songs that exist. All are true. In the dry land corn waits
for the holy presence of clouds and human beings
dance barefoot on hot earth with their love for rustling corn.
Others live in the the place where waters meet,
where the people climb mountains with the deer to watch
those clouds fly in, dark, full, ready to give birth, and
soon the water breaks and it flows.

Grace

Waking on the edge of morning, still dark,
the owl speaks one last word,
and I hear this world
from the other side of daylight
and go to sit at water, with great knowledge
of the eloquent speeches water makes,
watching for the trout in the next uplift from water,
and hear the insects, their music great as any,
meaningful as frogs before a rain.
Then it comes, gentle rain.
That is what makes for grace
and I can believe in such softness.
None of the miseries of the world
are meant for me, not this morning...
If you ask each day,
the continent is moist
with multitudes of life
beginning every moment.

In that first edge of morning,
let’s embrace the birds, the air,
the once again world as it grows
in this manner and, like us all,
needs embraced
For everything that has been hurt.

The Current Veins of History
Are open
as worlds
and borders
redefine themselves.
We wish for some new seed
of vision so the world may grow
if only for a moment silent, wordless,
and fresh as a bare room with windows open.

Even the earth knows these veins
that run like rivers of sweet water
into countries great one day,
gone the next, or flowing into one another.

As we are silent in this moment,
to be a friend, no weapon,
not even arrows of words,
just easy human waters together.
Be like the animal that opens hardness
and carries inside a pearl or like a goddess
That steps out into a new human accord.

[Virginia · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW, what powerful poetry with a use of minimal words to express her spirituality, love of the land and nature, and sorrow over the loss and degredation of the land. I just saw this on the shelf knowing nothing of the author and am more than impressed.

[Sarah Alcaide-Escue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tender and teeming with life.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haunting indigenous images and memories/collection of poems/poetry and stories light this history of kindness: “the majestic endangered missing / the beautiful gone. // Absence is the missing presence / that travels everywhere at once.” (“Absences” 122)

“You felt something follow you, / the living person inside, / and you have heard this voice for years / like a bell, invisible as air, / clear as a gentle rain / in that delicate slippage / so like the skin, permeable, / a thin line between what you believe gone / and what is still present.” (“Haunting” 117-118)

“after the ocean fell / from between her legs like rain. // And for that single measure, some vision large enough / to encompass all the great terrain of the future.” (“Fawn” 126-127)

“The white deer leaps the dirty river. / I follow in the wake of it, / the deer so like a cloud / I know she is more than a guide, / so perhaps she is partly / the way of milk, such sweetness, / the mothering sky, / the great countenance of spiral, of animals / from our earth, the milk of forever / an infant will seek. // … right here, right now, / you have to ask, / how often do you see it, / how often does it come to you, / how often, really, do you follow?” (“White Deer, Your Direction I Follow” 131-132)

“Here Is” (135)

“The Current Veins of History” (136-137)

Read and weep for joy.

[Maleri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I quite liked this collection of poems and I recommend that anyone who enjoys poetry to read it. I am not typically the type of person to read poetry, but I think this collection has quite a few good poems. One of these good poems is "One Creation", where Hogan describes how she wants "this world to survive never forgotten" and how "some live with forgotten truth." Another great poem is "The Kill", where she describe her exiting her house in the wilderness to find a recently killed and eaten deer. This deer was killed by "... the pack of wolves, / five ghostly presences", which alludes to how silent the wolves had been despite how quickly the deer had been turned to bones. There are many other beautifully written poems in this collection and I do believe that people should take the time to read through them.

[Silvio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful. But for some reason I couldn't fully connect with it. Maybe there was more grief and pain than I expected (or needed)? Or maybe sometimes I didn't manage to feel the compassion in her grief and pain? Or maybe reading indigenous literature/poetry will never be the same after having read Braiding Sweetgrass?
I think there will be a better time for me to (re-)read this little book. Until then I will appreciate it with gratitude, because that's what it deserves.
And, oh, how I adore the cover art!

[Élise · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars
This kind of poetry is not for me, it must be my personal taste but I like more "structured" poems; although pretty and quite evocative, these often didn't even read like poetry but some seemed more like prose to me. I found the poems to be cohesive, and I enjoyed the way the author conveyed her love for nature and her Native roots. I particularly liked a couple passages in the first section, they were good food for thought, but afterwards, especially the second part of the book, the rest of poems felt kind of repetitive in concept and delivery.

[Peggy Heitmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. This book of kindness and nature. Linda's stories resonate with me. The language she uses is kind and gentle and honest loss and sorrow. I love the poem, "Dear Child!" I think it is my favorite. I also like "Arctic Night, Lights Across the Sky, and "Fawn," and "Burying the Horse." I thought the book should have ended with "To Be Held." Really, I loved all the poems in this book. I highly recommend.

[Bill Yake · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first of Linda Hogan's books I've read and I was impressed by her perspective: historical in its often aching acceptance of the awful treatment her people endured, her determination to heal wounds and offer clues to the medicine required for that healing, her empathy for fellow creatures, her combination of fierceness and kindness. I will explore her work further.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. I highly recommend.

[Keely · Rating 4 out of 5]

“How we all want love,
Even the waters,
So let them be healthy and clean,
Let us be carried
Alive on the water of a planet,
Along with it,
Not just by it, but for it.”

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

"...we are the river, sometimes weeping,
sometimes laughing
in this brief life
And we can't help it but we love other waters,
opening glorious into one another."

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like most poetry collections I’ve read - some gems within, some not so much. But overall good.

[Lisa Stice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Linda Hogan's poetry is always quietly beautiful.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

pisa chokma

"Be like the animal that opens hardness
and carries inside a pearl or a goddess
that steps out to a new human accord."

[Kaitlyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let me start this off by saying I think this book might just be beyond my level of intellect, and therefore I couldn’t entirely appreciate it for what it was. I want to read this again when I’m feeling more inspired by poetry and see if I can fully understand this collection and adjust my rating.

That being said, I think it is good. The author is clearly talented and knows how to create lovely imagery. However, my mind kept wandering through the poems and some were so similar I wondered if I accidently went back a page or two without realizing it. I don’t think they’re similar in the message or topic, but in the words used for imagery. I also think this collection reads a lot like prose, which I can appreciate once in a while but it has a rhythm that isn’t my favorite.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, that really just comes down to preference. I think most poetry lovers would actually read this collection and enjoy it a lot!

Despite all that, there are plenty of poems in here that I found to be true gems that I adored very much:

• What We Kept
• The Names of Creeks
• Distance Not Time
• A History Of Kindness
• Tulsa (top three)
• The Bears Eating
• Burying The Horse (my favorite)

[Kaycee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful poetry laced with the generational pain of colonization. I found myself super interested in the poetry, but less interested in the chapters where the author discusses the background of where the poems came from. I enjoy learning that when I know a lot about the author as a person, but as a first time reader, I wanted to gather my own perspective of the words being presented.

[Mandy Hazen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful poetry.

[Paige · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Bathing with Tender Care”
——> how soft, verily soft


“Recuerdo”
——> For now, I merely go through that one day again, remembering, traveling toward the river…blood memory, salt water memory, toward our laughter and joy that moves once again through this heart.


“Bone, Looking at the Pieta”
——> a simple mother with her son, grown, loved, in this last moment laid across her legs, as forever she weeps, having lifted him to her, barely and forever held in the lap of the mother.


“We Used to Have Pearls”
——> When your spirit no longer shines, you crave gems


“One Creation”
——> I am a warrior, wanting this world to survive, never forgotten.


“Sunshine”
——> (love for the blind cat)


“Isn’t It Love”
——> Isn't it love that pulls me into the world, the morning sky colored by rouge and becoming deep and clear blue, as though a spring of water has entered red earth? That is the place our relatives said the buffalo went to wait for some safe day so their spirits could return.


“River Singing”
——> We are the river, sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing in this brief life. And we can’t help it but we love other waters, opening glorious into one another.


"This life of mine may be humble, but is rich in love, trees, and waters...I am in love with this land, the animals, all the growing life and the water passing through here, with the trees speaking in the wind outside the windows...Thank you Home, Land, Soil, Trees, and History."