Original Fire

by Louise Erdrich

A passionate book of poetry from New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich.

In this important collection, award-winning author Louise Erdrich has selected poems from her two previous books of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, and has added nineteen new poems to compose Original Fire.

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

174 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

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

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

How weak I have become walking in my heavy shoes.
*
I sift my thoughts into this perfect zero,
into the silken core between minus and plus.
I walk through the terminal number
backward, into the negative
where deep snow falls.
Again I am a child. I stand in the snow
and all around me is the snow
I stand there until I turn to snow.
And then, for a moment, I know you.
*
Sometimes you have to take your own hand
as though you were a lost child
and bring yourself stumbling
home over twisted ice.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

As is often the case with poetry, this was hit and miss for me. Many I just couldn't find a way into, but the ones I could were searing.

Two favorites were "Grief," that begins
Sometimes you have to take your own hand
as though you were a lost child

and "Advice to Myself," that begins
Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator.

I am open to reading more of her poetry, but her prose may be what I love best.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now more known for her award-winning novels, Louise Erdrich's writing career began with poetry. This collection gathers poems from her two published books and some new poems to show the fascinating evolution of her poetry. Her poems are marked by her native American heritage and a strong connection to nature and sexuality. A strong overview of her poetry career.

[Brendan M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is pretty fucking hot for a collection of poems mostly about nature. And Catholicism. And Native American/First Nations history and culture. And time. And how we are all ashes and dust. W/e, it's real steamy, go read it.

[Aitana Monzón · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Why do I long
to be devoured and to forget
in life rather than in death?
What is the difference?”

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my not particularly humble opinion, Wendell Berry and Louise Erdrich are the two most compelling living poets I've read. Both are novelists and poets. Both write about people in rural societies with a deep sense of place. Both have a personal and prayerful relationship with the Divine. Both cut through stories of individual lives to universal truth with alarming accuracy. The pen is mightier than the sword in their hands... Berry leans a bit more toward place and Erdrich more toward people, which may be a gender thing, but by all of their works poetry or narrative, I am so utterly engaged as to forget there is a world other than that which they are creating in front of my hungry eyes. "Original Fire" was published in this edition in 2004 and it saddens me a little that this is the first time I picked it up. Generally speaking, in most books of poetry I find one poem I really love. In "Original Fire," I found one that DIDN'T take my breath away or leave my head shaking...

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like everything Erdrich writes - fiction, essays, poetry... These poems blend legend, myth, and storytelling traditions with her German and Native heritage. A favorite Minnesota author/bookseller Birchbark Books in Minneapolis is wonderful! If you don't know her or her books, you should...

[Jack Bruno · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this, of course. Her combination of inner worlds, desire, natural worlds, tricksters and storytellers always leaves me renewed, breathless and still homesick.

[Rosa Jamali · Rating 5 out of 5]

from “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways”

Louise Erdrich

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.

The concept of home is very well-discussed and constructed here. Where home could be and a the reader might analyse the archetype of returning home which has been seen quite often in children's tales and stories, in most of these tales a child has been lost in a jungle and wants to get back, here, on the contrary, we see an adult who has been lost and cannot get back to his origin,…
Here very sharply we face the definition of home and a boarding school which has been specified.
Again here we see the tone of automation as if life has turned to a kind of automatic procession.This Poignant tone has given the poem a sense of indifference.
The style the poet is creating sounds quite noticeable.
Naturally, the poet is creating a story's outline in poetry.
The voices of Native Americans and Indians have been presented quite well.
Getting back to your origins as Mowlana says:
"Beshno az nei chon hekayat mikonad/ az jodayeeha shekayat mikonad"

[Laura (booksnob) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lately, I have been reading poetry. It sounds crazy, I know but poetry was my first love. I loved poetry before I knew I liked to read. I wrote poetry before I knew that I liked to write. Then I went to college and quit reading and writing poetry. Fast forward 20 years and poetry has popped back into my life in a new and significant way.

Louise Erdrich is a writer on fire and her poems in this volume, Original Fire, are amazing. Poetry speaks to each reader differently. Some poems seemingly have no effect and others knock your socks off. Many of the poems in Original Fire knocked my socks off and made me think and made me say Wow.

This collection of poems was a combination of some of her poems from two previous volumes of poetry with about 20 new poems not previously published added in. The poems are broken into five sections titled, Jacklight, The Potchikoo Stories, The Butcher's Wife, The Seven Sleepers and Original Fire.

I started reading a poem or two a day this fall and I look forward to my stolen moments with a poem. It was especially hard to only read one or two of Erdrich's poems. I was compelled to keep turning the pages but I wanted to savor them and so I read them slowly to give my mind time to process them before I moved on. The ending two sections of Original Fire are my favorite and the poems packed a powerful punch. I loved the Buffalo Prayer, Advice to Myself, The Seven Sleepers, The Sacraments and many others.

Here is the beginning of The Sacraments

I. Baptism

As the sun dancers, in their helmets of sage,
Stopped at the sun's apogee
and stood in the waterless light,
so, after loss, it came to this:
that for each year the being was destroyed,
I was to sacrifice a piece of my flesh.
The keen knife hovered
and the skin flicked in the bowl.
Then the sun, the life that consumes us,
burst into agony.

Have you read any poetry lately??

[ReadBecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Forgot to log that I had read this on Thanksgiving, as I'd wanted to take a moment for an indigenous voice on the day. Just a short collection of poetry, as I find with most poetry collections some really blew me away while others I didn't really connect with, but over all very good. One of my favorite passages:

Wind runs itself beneath the dust like a hand
lifting a scarf.
Mother, you say, and I hold you.
I tell you I was wrong, I am sorry.
So we listen to coyotes.
And their weeping is not of this earth
where it is called sorrow, but of another earth
where it is known as joy,
and I am able
to walk into the tree of forgiveness with you
and disappear there
and know myself.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

At one time your touches were clothing enough. Within these trees now I am different. Now I wear the woods. Now shadows move freely within me as words. These are eternal, these stunned, loosened verbs. Why were we given this unearthly radiance, this blueness, if not to seek it out, to love it with all our hearts?

Amazing breadth of poems here, encompassing seemingly the entire history of the planet. Sad, wise, funny, earthy, earthly, a treasure trove. Respect and honor to the American Indian experience Erdrich uses to teach us. Perfect accompaniment for time spent in stolen lands at Grand Canyon and Utah recently, places that light my soul up.

EXCERPTS

ASINIIG
The Ojibwe word for stone, asin, is animate. Stones are alive. They are addressed as grandmothers and grandfathers. The universe began with a conversation between stones.

A thousand generations of you live and die
in the space of a single one of our thoughts.
A complete thought is a mountain.

When we break ourselves open—
that is when the healing starts.
When you break yourselves open—
that is how the healing continues.

WOOD MOUNTAIN

The sky glows yellow over the tin hump
of Mount Anaeus, and below on the valley floor
the fog cracks and lifts.
Beyond it the throat of the river flares.
The river shakes its body
of terminal mirrors.

I saw you walk down the mountain yesterday.
You were wearing your stained blue jacket,
your cheap, green boots.
You disappeared into a tree
the way you always did, in grief.
I went looking for you.
In the orchard floored with delicate grass,
I lay down with the deer.
A sweet, smoky dust rose
from the dead silver of firs.

When I stand in the circle of their calm black arms
I talk to you. I tell you everything.
And you do not weep.
You accept
how it was
night came down.
Ice formed on your eyelids.
How the singing began,
that was not music
but the cold heat of stars.

Wind runs itself beneath the dust like a hand
lifting a scarf.
Mother, you say, and I hold you.
I tell you I was wrong, I am sorry.
So we listen to coyotes.
And their weeping is not of this earth
where it is called sorrow, but of another earth
where it is known as joy,
and I am able
to walk into the tree of forgiveness with you
and disappear there
and know myself.
THE WOODS
At one time your touches were clothing enough.
Within these trees now I am different.
Now I wear the woods.

THE LEFAVOR GIRLS
There was abundance come down
in the face of the coming year.
We held ourselves into
the wind, our bodies
broke open, and the snow began falling.
It fell until the world was filled up, and filled again,
until it rose past all the limits we could have known.

HERE IS A GOOD WORD…

because someone must pare the fruit soft to the core
into slivers, must wrap the dead bones in her skirts
and lay these things out on her table, and fit
each oddment to each to resemble a life.

NEW VOWS

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.

THE SACRAMENTS
I open my mouth and I speak though it is only a thin sound, a leaf scraping on a leaf.
THE SEVEN SLEEPERS
I seek you full of me, as if I could drink you in
and overcome myself.
I seek you under everything
in parallel faults and shifting plates.

NINTH MONTH

This is the last month, the petrified forest
and the lake which has long since turned to grass.
The sun roars over, casting its light and absence
in identical seams. One day. Another.

NEW MOTHER

I am here to praise this body
on loan from the gods
by which we know the god in us
and see the god made earth, pulled out blue
and stunned into the lights.

BLUE

I have moved beyond my life
into the blueness of the tiny flower
called Sky Pilot.
The sheer stain of the petals
fills the sky in my heart.
Over the field,
two bluebirds pause
on shivering wings.
They could as well have been
a less glorious color, and the flowers too.

Why were we given this unearthly radiance, this blueness,
if not to seek it out, to love it with all our hearts?

LITTLE BLUE EYEGLASSES

Above all, little blue eyeglasses,
train her eyes upon the truth
and let her eyes rest in the truth
and help her see within the truth
the strength to bear the truth.

GRIEF
Sometimes you have to take your own hand
as though you were a lost child
and bring yourself stumbling home
over twisted ice.

Whiteness drifts over your house.
A page of warm light
falls steady from the open door.

Here is your bed, folded open.
Lie down, lie down, let the blue snow cover you.

ADVICE TO MYSELF
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

MORNING FIRE

My baby, eating rainbows of sun
focused through a prism in my bedroom window,
puts her mouth to the transparent fire,
and licks up the candy colors
that tremble on the white sheets.
The stain spreads across her face.
She has only one tooth,
a grain of white rice
that keeps flashing.
She keeps eating as the day begins
until the rainbows are all inside of her.
And then she smiles
and such a light pours over me.

[karenbee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Argh, I can tell it isn't Erdrich, it's me, which is very frustrating. Original Fire is full of the kind of poetry I can't break into so I stumbled through the collection, often reading words without fully comprehending what Erdrich was trying to say.

There were a few poems I loved, but most of them were just feelings to me, or worse, exercises in trying to figure out what everything meant as I read the poem, which is my least favorite way to read poetry.

The lines that punched through my poetry-ignorant stupor were excellent, though.


(two and a half stars)

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has easily become one of my favorite collections of poetry. Erdrich's storytelling through poetry is clever and her poems on religion are provoking in a way that excites. She manipulates language beautifully.

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for National Poetry Month 2016.

Even though the content of the poems didn't always speak to me, I really liked how she said it... some stanzas and lines were perfect. I will seek out more from this author.

[Rabbit {Paint me like one of your 19th century gothic heroines!} · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very powerful collection to read. It's been too long since I sat down with a poetry book, and I was glad to break my fast with this one. I read this whole book in one sitting. I could not put it down.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collection of poetry weaving the history of the Native Americans and German immigrants that make up the poet's family tree. Excellent stuff.

[Sienna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Confession: I'm a fussy poetry reader, preferring collected poems to their selected counterparts. My theory is that if they're good I'd rather read a bunch of them than a cherry-picked few before moving on to another handful carefully selected by someone whose taste may be very different from mine. This selection, though, begins stunningly with the eponymous piece from 1984's Jacklight, and then "The Woods." Erdrich beckons to us from within their depths, her eyes flashing:

At one time your touches were clothing enough.
Within these trees now I am different.
Now I wear the woods.

I lower a headdress of bent sticks and secure it.
I strap to myself a breastplate of clawed, roped bark.
I fit the broad leaves of sugar maples
to my hands, like mittens of blood.

Now when I say come,
and you enter the woods,
hunting some creature like the woman I was,
I surround you.

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

These are powerful, haunting poems, inhabiting and inhabited by nature: less articulate than fiercely articulated, forceful. "The Strange People," which takes the inscrutable dark-eyed gaze of antelopes as its subject, staggered me with this deft transition:

All day, asleep in clean grasses,
I dream of the one who could really wound me.
Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look.
Not even with his goodness.

If I man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.
I swear I would never leave him.

But it's hard when the high points appear early, raising expectations that wait page after page for fulfillment. Long stretches of Original Fire failed to ignite in my mind, something soft and porous mistaken for flint. The Potchikoo stories made me smile and occasionally wince, but didn't stick. By contrast, "The Butcher's Wife," another segment from Baptism of Desire, grabbed hold of my attention immediately and continued to hold it with strong imagery, unexpected twists and connections:

But something queer happens when the heart is delivered.
When a child is born, sometimes the left hand is stronger.
You can train it to fail, still the knowledge is there.

[...]

Butch once remarked there was no one so deft
as my Otto. So true, there is great tact involved
in parting the flesh from the bones that it loves.

How we cling to the bones.

Something about "The Carmelites," from this sequence, both delights and frightens me. Perhaps it's the distance between us.

I've thought of her, so ordinary, rising every night,
scarred like the moon in her observance,
shaved and bound and bandaged
in rough blankets like a poor mare's carcass,
muttering for courage at the very hour
cups crack in the cupboards downstairs, and Otto
turns to me with urgency and power.
Tremendous love, the cry stuffed back, the statue
smothered in its virtue till the glass corrodes,
and the buried structure shows,
the hoops, the wires, the blackened arcs,
freeze to acid in the strange heart.

I last read Erdrich as a teenager and am struck by the kinship between her novels and these storytelling poems. It seems to me she is at her best when the words seem to flood out of her, a kind of predestined presentiment: she and they share a conviction in their truth, their rightness. There's a beauty to her language that belies her language (see "Advice to Myself") and I wish the whole book felt like this. But it is, after all, a selection, and a pretty good one at that, because it introduced me to "Clouds." I can't resist closing with the second half of this exquisite, meandering, drunken poem.

What kind of thoughts, Mary Kröger, are these?
With a headful of spirits,
how else can I think?
Under so many clouds,
such hooded and broken
old things. They go on
simply folding, unfolding, like sheets
hung to dry and forgotten.

And no matter how careful I watch them,
they take a new shape,
escaping my concentrations,
they slip and disperse
and extinguish themselves.

They melt before I half unfathom their forms.
Just as fast, a few bones
disconnecting beneath us.
It is too late, I fear, to call these things back.
Not in this language.
Not in this life.

I know it. The tongue is unhinged by the sauce.
But these clouds, creeping toward us
each night while the milk
gets scorched in the pan,
great soaked loaves of bread
are squandering themselves in the west.

Look at them: Proud, unpausing.
Open and growing, we cannot destroy them
or stop them from moving
down each avenue,
the dogs turn on their chains,
children feel through the windows.
What else should we feel our way through —

We lay our streets over
the deepest cries of the earth
and wonder why everything comes down to this:
The days pile and pile.
The bones are too few
and too foreign to know.
Mary, you do not belong here at all.

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 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.

[T.L. Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Original Fire: Selected and New Poems by Louise Erdrich explores religion, death, and life in ways that are thought provoking and emotionally provocative. Some of the poems made me squirm as I read. Some felt like a glimpse inside a world I'll never be part of. Some resonated with me more than I expected. Erdrich writes about the intersection of cultural identities in a world where those identities both uplift and suppress. The poems within Original Fire plays with our perceptions, instincts, and assumptions about the world we inhabit. At times the religion aspects overwhelmed me even as they showed me a glimpse of the way religion permeates life and invades culture. Overall, Original Fire is filled with stories written as poems that spark the imagination and offer an interesting perspective on the interactions between human beings, nature, and other Earthlings.

[Lisa M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read one of Louise Erdrich's novels, "The Round House," previously. I have some of her novels on my to read list. So, when I went to the used bookstore and looked for my next poetry collection, this book stood out. Overall, I enjoyed the collection. "Jacklight" stood out. I found "The Butcher's Wife" to be confusing at times. Erdrich's poetic talent lies in her word choice and detailed descriptions.

[Justina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was phenomenal; at points it gave me chills because of the vivid language and the somber topics. Each poem had a rich historical background, and details that made the characters (as well as the objects the characters described) so real. Her style of poetry flows very well, and having read the author's other prose novels, it was nice to see the poet-side of things!

[Solita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some I enjoyed, but some confused me. But poetry can do that, so maybe it's just me. In the poem "Grief" I don't get the line, "Here is your bed, folded open." I thought of a roll-away bed, but you unfold those open. "...folded open"? So, that just gets past me. Some confused me, some I just didn't care for, and some I enjoyed.

[Nymeria]

As usual with poetry, it's kind of hit and miss for me, but overall I really enjoyed this collection (though I think I prefer Jacklight and The Butcher's Wife than the new ones). My favorite poems were: The Woods (has a bit of an Angela Carter vibe, doesn't it?), Captivity (!), The Butcher's Wife, The Pull from the Left, Clouds, Fooling God, New Mother.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a fascinating collection of poems and short stories that center around being Native that's a combination of the past and present with a mix of adventure, the years of oppression Natives have had to endure and so much more.

I highly recommend checking out this collection.

Trigger warnings: death, oppression of Natives, some violence

[Peggy Heitmann · Rating 1 out of 5]

Took me a long time to get through this one. I was hoping to gain some understanding about the life of a Native American from someone who can speak with authority. And though I am sure Louise does speak with authority seems to me she focuses on the seedier side of her inheritance. Even her angles have metal wings. Just not to my liking.

[Amy K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Complex, brilliant, by turns scathing and bitterly funny, and ultimately entirely, relatably human, the poems in this collection evoked a myriad of reactions from me, often opposing reactions simultaneously. Profound and wonderful words.

[Care]

This is a nice selection of Erdrich's poetry from over the years. I have already explored Jacklight and Baptism of Desire so there are some repeats here but nice to encounter them again.

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not what I thought I was getting at all, but still pretty interesting. I'm not always good at understanding poetry, but I found a couple of really good ones in here that I loved.

[carmen! · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read this because it had one of my favorite poems in it ("advice to myself"). the other ones didn't really get me though. ah well.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like her fiction, Erdrich’s poetry is witty, earthy and enigmatic, drawing much from Native myth and experience.