Original Fire

by Erdrich, Louise

• ISBN13: 9780066209869
• ISBN10: 0066209862
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-08-14
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

<p>In this important new collection, her first in fourteen years, award-winning author Louise Erdrich has selected poems from her two previous books of poetry, <i>Jacklight</i> and <i>Baptism of Desire</i>, and added new poems to compose <i>Original Fire</i>.</p><p>Profound and accessible, this collection anticipates and enlarges upon many of the themes, and even the characters, of Erdrich's prose. A sequence of story poems called "The Potchikoo Stories" recounts the life and afterlife of the questing trickster Potchikoo, echoing the wit and humanity of the inimitable, Nanapush, who appears in several of Erdrich's novels, most recently <i>The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse</i>. Similarly, the group of poems called "The Butcher's Wife" contains the germ of Erdrich's most recent novel, <i>The Master Butchers Singing Club</i>.</p><p>A powerful new poem, "The Seven Sleepers," forms the core of an entire section of the book and is about the passionate search for the divine in all its forms. The final section, "Original Fire," travels through birth, ordinary life, loss, and redemption. These poems reveal that poetry emerges from what we fear most, and that memory is endurance.</p>

Table of Contents

Jacklight
Jacklight	3	(3)
The Woods	6	(1)
The Strange People	7	(2)
Captivity	9	(3)
Owls	12	(2)
I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move	14	(2)
Family Reunion	16	(3)
Indian Boarding School: The Runaways	19	(2)
Dear John Wayne	21	(2)
Manitoulin Ghost	23	(2)
Three Sisters	25	(2)
The Lefavor Girls	27	(2)
Walking in the Breakdown Lane	29	(1)
The Red Sleep of Beasts	30	(5)
The Potchikoo Stories
The Birth of Potchikoo	35	(1)
Potchikoo Marries	36	(1)
How Potchikoo Got Old	37	(2)
The Death of Potchikoo	39	(2)
Potchikoo's Life After Death	41	(1)
How They Don't Let Potchikoo into Heaven	41	(1)
Where Potchikoo Goes Next	42	(2)
Potchikoo's Detour	44	(1)
Potchikoo Greets Josette	45	(1)
Potchikoo Restored	46	(1)
Potchikoo's Mean Twin	47	(2)
How Josette Takes Care of It	49	(1)
Saint Potchikoo	50	(5)
The Butcher's Wife
The Butcher's Wife	55	(2)
That Pull from the Left	57	(2)
The Carmelites	59	(1)
Clouds	60	(4)
Shelter	64	(3)
The Slow Sting of Her Company	67	(2)
Here Is a Good Word for Step-and-a-Half Waleski	69	(2)
Portrait of the Town Leonard	71	(2)
Leonard Commits Redeeming Adulteries with All the Women in Town	73	(2)
Unexpected Dangers	75	(2)
My Name Repeated on the Lips of the Dead	77	(3)
A Mother's Hell	80	(2)
Rudy Comes Back	82	(2)
New Vows	84	(3)
The Seven Sleepers
Fooling God	87	(2)
The Sacraments	89	(8)
The Seven Sleepers	97	(10)
Avila	107	(2)
Saint Clare	109	(7)
Mary Magdalene	116	(1)
Christ's Twin	117	(2)
Orozco's Christ	119	(1)
The Savior	120	(2)
The Buffalo Prayer	122	(1)
Rez Litany	123	(6)
Original Fire
The Fence	129	(2)
Ninth Month	131	(1)
Birth	132	(1)
New Mother	133	(2)
Sorrows of the Frog Woman	135	(5)
Time	140	(1)
Spring Evening on Blind Mountain	141	(1)
Blue	142	(1)
Thistles	143	(1)
Best Friends in the First Grade	144	(1)
Little Blue Eyeglasses	145	(1)
Grief	146	(1)
Wood Mountain	147	(2)
Advice to Myself	149	(2)
Morning Fire	151	(2)
Asiniig	153

Excerpts

Original Fire
Selected and New Poems

Jacklight

The same Chippewa word is used both for flirting and hunting game, while another Chippewa word connotes both using force in intercourse and also killing a bear with one's bare hands.

-- R. W. Dunning, Social and Economic Change Among the Northern Ojibwa (1959)

We have come to the edge of the woods,
out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,
out of knotted twigs, out of leaves creaked shut,
out of hiding.

At first the light wavered, glancing over us.
Then it clenched to a fist of light that pointed,
searched out, divided us.
Each took the beams like direct blows the heart answers.
Each of us moved forward alone.

We have come to the edge of the woods,
drawn out of ourselves by this night sun,
this battery of polarized acids,
that outshines the moon.

We smell them behind it
but they are faceless, invisible.
We smell the raw steel of their gun barrels,
mink oil on leather, their tongues of sour barley.
We smell their mothers buried chin-deep in wet dirt.
We smell their fathers with scoured knuckles,
teeth cracked from hot marrow.
We smell their sisters of crushed dogwood, bruised apples,
of fractured cups and concussions of burnt hooks.

We smell their breath steaming lightly behind the jacklight.
We smell the itch underneath the caked guts on their clothes.
We smell their minds like silver hammers
cocked back, held in readiness
for the first of us to step into the open.

We have come to the edge of the woods,
out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,
out of leaves creaked shut, out of hiding.
We have come here too long.

It is their turn now,
their turn to follow us. Listen,
they put down their equipment.
It is useless in the tall brush.

Original Fire
Selected and New Poems. Copyright © by Louise Erdrich. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Original Fire: Selected and New Poems by Louise Erdrich
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.