Jacklight

by Louise Erdrich

Poems explore the nature of love, faith, and courage and portray the experiences of a wife in a small town

Genres: Poetry, Indigenous, Native American, American, Fiction

85 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Karen Louise Erdrich is a American author of novels, poetry, and children's books. Her father is German American and mother is half Ojibwe and half French American. She is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Chippewa). She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant Native writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.

For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/louise-e...

From a book description:

Author Biography:

Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of contemporary Native American novelists. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, she grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She worked at various jobs, such as hoeing sugar beets, farm work, waitressing, short order cooking, lifeguarding, and construction work, before becoming a writer. She attended the Johns Hopkins creative writing program and received fellowships at the McDowell Colony and the Yaddo Colony. After she was named writer-in-residence at Dartmouth, she married professor Michael Dorris and raised several children, some of them adopted. She and Michael became a picture-book husband-and-wife writing team, though they wrote only one truly collaborative novel, The Crown of Columbus (1991).

The Antelope Wife was published in 1998, not long after her separation from Michael and his subsequent suicide. Some reviewers believed they saw in The Antelope Wife the anguish Erdrich must have felt as her marriage crumbled, but she has stated that she is unconscious of having mirrored any real-life events.

She is the author of four previous bestselling andaward-winning novels, including Love Medicine; The Beet Queen; Tracks; and The Bingo Palace. She also has written two collections of poetry, Jacklight, and Baptism of Desire. Her fiction has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle (1984) and The Los Angeles Times (1985), and has been translated into fourteen languages.

Several of her short stories have been selected for O. Henry awards and for inclusion in the annual Best American Short Story anthologies. The Blue Jay's Dance, a memoir of motherhood, was her first nonfiction work, and her children's book, Grandmother's Pigeon, has been published by Hyperion Press. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore called The Birchbark.

Reviews

[Dustin the wind Crazy little brown owl · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The antelope are strange people . . . they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never right in their heads."
- Pretty-shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows, Frank Bird Linderman (1932)

There are stories in these verses. In fact, there is one inclusion in particular, Old Man Potchikoo, that might be more aptly classified as short story than poetry.

Favorite Passages:
JACKLIGHT
We smell their minds like silver hammers
. . . .
And now they take the first steps, not knowing
how deep the woods are and lightless.
How deep the woods are.

RUNAWAYS
A Love Medicine
He wears a long rut in the fog.
. . . .
I find her curled up in the roots of a cottonwood.
I find her stretched out in the park, where all night
the animals are turning in their cages.
I find her in a burnt-over ditch, in a field
that is gagging on rain,

Indian Boarding School: The Runaways
Home's the place we head for in our sleep.
Boxcars stumbling north in dreams
don't wait for us. We catch them on the run.
The rails, old lacerations that we love,
shoot parallel across the face and break
just under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars
you can't get lost. Home is the place they cross.

Rugaroo
He is the one in the cattails at the edge of your dream.
He is the man who will not let you sleep.
. . . . . .
And even the glass marks, ring within ring
of spilled drinks. When I sit here
the widest warped links have a center.
Strung out they're a year's worth of slack, a tether
that swings around the spine's dark pole

and swings back.

The Lady in the Pink Mustang
There is a point in the distance where the road meets itself,
where coming and going must kiss into one.
She is always at that place, seen from behind,
motionless, torn forward, living in a zone
all her own. It is like she has burned right through time,
the brand, the mark, owning the woman who bears it.

Walking in the Breakdown Lane
Wind has stripped
the young plum trees
to a thin howl.
They are planted in squares
to keep the loose dirt from wandering.
Everything around me is crying to be gone.
The fields, the crops humming to be cut and done with.

Walking in the breakdown lane, margin of gravel,
between the cut swaths and road to Fargo,
I want to stop, to lie down
in standing wheat or standing water.

Behind me thunder mounts as trucks of cattle
roar over, faces pressed to slats for air.
They go on, they go on without me.
They pound, pound and bawl,
until the road closes over them farther on.

HUNTERS
The Woods
Light bleeds from the clearing. Roots rise.
Fluted molds burn blue in the falling light,
and you also know
the loneliness that you taught me with your body.

When you lay down in the grave of a slashed tree,
I cover you, as I always did;
this time you do not leave.

The Levelers
I wanted to reverse that sure motion
that means to me now we are going.

Even stopping to let the world sway forward without us,
allowing the silence to clarify, loss
began to breathe a black soot in the glass. I knew then
an obscurity smokes
in the clearest of forms.

THE BUTCHER'S WIFE
Shelter
All graves are shelters for our mislaid twins.
. . . .
This is how our lives complete themselves,
as effortless as weather, circles blaze
in ordinary days, and through our waking selves
they reach, to touch our true and sleeping speech.
. . . .
All graves are pregnant with our nearest kin.

The Slow Sting of Her Company
Live blood let down the drain.

My Name Repeated on the Lips of the Dead
. . . his mother, a small spider of a woman - all fingers.
She covered everything, from the kettle to the radio,
with a doily. The whole house
dripped with lace, frosting fell
from each surface in fantastic shapes.
. . . .
So I was sure, for a time and a time after,
that Rudy carried
my name down to hell on his tongue
like a black coin.

A Mother's Hell
I don't like things with beaks. I don't
Like anything that makes a beating sound.

The Book of Water
The kitchen clock
traveled forward on its hidden wheels.
I went through the rooms and turned the shadows to the walls.
. . . .
And then the long birds walked up on the shore, and I saw
the water was a great book that opened turned forward,
erasing the herons' tracks before I read and understood.

MYTHS
I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move
Above us drifted herons,
alone, hoarse-voiced, broken,
settling their beaks among the hollows.

Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people,
moving above us, unable to take their rest.

Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.
Their long wings are bending the air
into circles through which they fall.
They rise again in shifting wheels.
How long must we live in the broken figures
their necks make, narrowing the sky.

The Lefavor Girls
All autumn, black plums
split and dropped from the boughs.
We gathered the sweetness
and sealed it in jars,
loading the cupboards and cellar.

The Red Sleep of Beasts
We lived headlong, taking what we could
But left no scraps behind, not like the other
Hide hunters, hidden on a rise,
Their long-eyes brought herds one by one
To earth. They took but tongues, and you could walk
For miles across the strange hulks.
. . . .
At night we touched each other in our dreams
Hearing, on the wind, their slow hooves stumbling
. . . .
We heard them traveling, heard the frozen birches
Break before their long retreat
Into the red sleep.

Turtle Mountain Reservation
The heron makes a cross
flying low over marsh.
Its heart is an old compass
pointing off in four directions.
It drags the world along,
the world it becomes.
. . . .
At dusk the gray owl walks the length of the roof,
sharpening its talons on the shingles.
. . . .
she has been washing all day. She smells
like a hayfield, drifting pollen
of birch trees.
Her hair steals across her shoulders
like a postcard sunset.

[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 4 out of 5]

2024:

"Widowed by men, I married the dark firs,
as if I were walking in sleep toward their arms,
I drank, without fear or desire,
this odd fire."

Louise Erdrich, tonight, read slow and steady as a map held above the flood, because I needed a certain kind of fire, made before I was born.

***

2018:

You treat Erdrich with Erdrich. That is, if you are longing for more of her, you turn directly to her; no one else will do. Jacklight shares a publication year with Love Medicine, and there are deep tracks of plot and storyline in this first book of poems: boringly, you could call it a novelist's collection of poetry. More to the marrow, Jacklight shines in the dark, for hunters and hookers, for windigos and butcher's widows. A blue, restless light breaks on the horizons of these poems, summoning deer, dangerous men, and all antlered beings.

[Nancy Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like poetry that says things in a way that hits you right here, or that makes you laugh, or that jerks your tears. But these were little stories, little vignettes that didn't have much emotional impact: a family goes to the drive-in theater, a woman drives a pink Mustang...

The most interesting piece in this collection was the one that was written in prose as a short story: Old Man Potchikoo.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am slowly tuning my ear in to poetry. I no longer need regular rhythms to carry me through a piece, or bind me to it.

But I'm still on the hunt for beauty. I can't help it. I want to be touched and moved. Beautifully. I don't want to be made uncomfortable by imagery, even as I master less familiar structures and rhythms.

Louise Erdrich unsettles me. She hints at beauty and paces out a circle around it and uses it to draw you in, and then takes it away from you, leaving something rougher and scarier in its place. She scares me.

But she scares me in such a way that I can't tear my eyes off the words. 'The Strange People' has travelled from being one of the poems I found hardest to read to being the one I have gone back to the most frequently.

The antelope are strange people ... they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads.
Pretty Shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows, transcribed and edited by Frank Linderman (1932)

All night I am the doe, breathing
his name in a frozen field,
the small mist of the word
drifting always before me.

And again he has heard it
and I have gone burning
to meet him, the jacklight
fills my eyes with blue fire;
the heart in my chest
explodes like a hot stone.

Then slung like a sack
in the back of his pickup,
I wipe the death scum
from my mouth, sit up laughing
and shriek in my speeding grave.

Safely shut in the garage,
when he sharpens his knife
and thinks to have me, like that,
I come toward him,
a lean gray witch
through the bullets that enter and dissolve.

I sit in his house
drinking coffee till dawn
and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps,
crawling back into my shadowy body.
All day, asleep in clean grasses,
I dream of the one who could really wound me.

Not everything is frightening. Some poems strike deep and clean. This was particularly true for me in the sequence 'The Butcher's Wife', which sets the life of a widowed woman against a small Midwest town at the start of last century. The last poem in the series is 'New Vows':

The night was clean as the bone of a rabbit blown hollow.
I cast my hood of dogskin
away, and my shirt of nettles.
Ten years had been enough. I left my darkened house.

The trick was in living that death to its source.
When it happened, I wandered toward more than I was.

Widowed by men, I married the dark firs,
As if I were walking in sleep toward their arms.
I drank, without fear or desire,
this odd fire.

Now shadows move freely within me as words.
These are eternal, these stunned, loosened verbs.
And I can’t tell you yet
how truly I belong

to the hiss and shift of wind,
these slow, variable mouths
through which, at certain times, I speak in tongues.

Part Chippewa Indian, Erdrich's poems in this collection often weave Ojibwa myths and legends into Western poetic forms. Another favourite work in this collection shows this, and also the strong and sinewy yet lyrical nature of these pieces - 'Night Sky':

I

Arcturus, the bear driver,
shines on the leash of hunting dogs.
Do you remember how the woman becomes a bear
because her husband has run in sadness
to the forest of stars?

She soaks the bear hide
until it softens to fit her body
She ties the skinning boards over her heart.
She goes out, digs stumps,
smashes trees to test her power,
then breaks into a dead run
and hits the sky like a truck.

We are watching the moon
when this bear woman pulls herself
arm over arm into the tree of heaven.
We she her shadow clasp the one rusted fruit.
Her thick paw swings. The world dims.
We are alone here on earth
with the ragged breath of our children
coming and going in the old wool blankets.

II

Does she ever find him?
The sky is full of pits and snagged deadfalls.
She sleeps in shelters he's made of jackpine,
eats the little black bones
of birds he's roasted in cookfires.
She even sees him once
bending to drink from his own lips
in the river of starlight.

The truth is she cannot approach him
in the torn face and fur
stinking of shit and leather.
She is a real bear now,
licking bees from her paws, plunging
her snout in anthills,
rolling mad in the sour valleys
of skunk cabbage!

III

He knows she is there,
eyeing him steadily across the hornbeam
as she used to across the table.
He asks for strength
to leave his body at the river,
to leave it cradled in its sad arms
while he wanders in oiled muscles
bear heft, shag, and acorn fat.
Her goes to her, heading
for the open,
the breaking moon.

IV

Simple
to tear free
stripped and shining
to ride through crossed firs

[Tova · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only read 1 poem out of this book. That is Windigo and I'm reciting that poem for Poetry Outloud 2016. I choose this poem because it spoke to me. I adore it's creepy vibe and the atmospheric quality. It's creepy and I love reciting it!

[Phil J · Rating 2 out of 5]

I took me an awful long time to get through this. The first 36 poems were largely about sexual abuse, loss, mud and general dreariness. There was a lot of nature imagery, but it didn't do as much for me as it usually does. The next chapter was a cycle of poems about a butcher's widow. Those had a more interesting POV. Here are my favorite lines, from "Clouds,":

Sometimes I take back in tears this whole town
Let everything be how it could have been, once:
a land that was empty and perfect as clouds.
But this is the way people are.
All that appears to us empty,
We fill.
What is endless and simple,
We carve, and initial,
and narrow
roads that plow through the last of the hills
where our gravestones rear small
black vigilant domes.
Our friends, our family, the dead of our wars,
deep in this strange earth
we want to call ours.

[Audrey Ashbrook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jacklight by Louise Erdrich is a collection of poetry that explores a small town's people, myths and culture. 

I enjoyed this poetry collection! My favorites were: Jacklight, Dear John Wayne, The Woods, My Name Repeated On the Lips of the Dead, and The Strange People. 

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read a couple Louise Erdrich novels and liked them.
I have been to a reading she did, and liked her.
I have been to her bookstore in Minneapolis, and liked it.

Now I have finished an older book of her poetry, and liked it.
Erdrich tells evocative stories with her poems.

[Aitana Monzón]

ella es perfecta

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Challenges: May 2020 30/31 books; read a work of poetry each month (May). Erdrich's first work of poetry to be published came out of her exploration of her Ojibwe ancestral roots while working toward her Master's degree. Deeply personal exploration of her German ancestry as well, the clash between the dominate society and Native Americans (doves and peacocks vs. ravens and owls), the stubborn perseverance of the ancient (turtles), the intercession of the moon to carry human burdens for a time, clouds that pass through us during our darkest realities, and the interplay of water birds (cranes, loons, herons) between the earthbound and heaven.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry that weaves legend and folklore from two different cultures together to create a real feminist cry with voices that seem so intimate, you'd swear you knew these women.

Brilliant stuff, especially the poems of the Butcher's Wife.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite authors, Louise Erdrich's singular writing blends myth and metaphor and her own Native American/German heritage. This early poetry collection introduces some of the themes and characters you grow to love in her later novels.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would describe this collection as thoroughly okay. Some poems are kind of clunky and lanky, while others have a nice rhythm and flow to them with a few nice punches.

But, yeah - I much prefer her novels.

[Ann Stoudt]

The poems of Louise Erdrich reflect what it is to be a woman, a Midwesterner and a native American. She presents that region and those people without sentimentality, and although drawing from a deep well she does not ignore the ordinary. Her novels include " Love Medicine" .

[Jessica Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, timeless, elegant collection.

[Jude Brigley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection. I particularly liked the poem 'Dear Joh Wayne.'

[Chazz Glaze · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my favorite of her work by far.

[Iggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erdrich lays bare the enchantment of the everyday world and the forces that work on everyday people in a way that honors the ordinary and the otherworldly in equal measure.

[Care · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, Louise. She's been a massive talent since the start. It's a blessing to walk the earth at the same time as her.

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for he Butcher’s Wife Poems
“Shelter”, “The Butcher’s Wife” and “My
Name Repeated on the Lips of the Dead”
By Louise Erdrich

[Snooze Meister · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book of poetry from my favorite indigenous author.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the familiar characters as well as I enjoyed the personal poems. A few I liked so much I read them more than once. I try not to read her work too quickly because I don't ever want to be without a new one to read. Soon, though, I will find myself having to start again at the beginning with Love Medicine. There are worse fates.

[Celeste Trimble · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I like most about this collection is the connection with Erdrich's fictional characters. These poems feel like sketches, and seen in that light are wonderful. Seen as purely poetry, some are lacking a certain power that I have come to expect from her novels.

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Erdrich's novels, but after reading Jacklight, I do wish she'd publish more poetry! Intense, lyrical language, what makes her novels so moving distilled here in verse.

[Michelle Hoogterp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful poems.

[Bpaul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of my favorite American poems are in this book.

[Bea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very abstract - this was an early (1984) book and reveals themes used in her fiction. I do better with the fiction, which I love.

[Fishface · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a terrific, fairly early book of poetry by someone who went on to become on of my favorite novelists.

[Tatiana]

Jacklight fills every possible niche, with poems ranging from haunting to hilarious, idyllic to depressing. The way that Erdrich can turn a page into a picture is evidence of her genius.