Gerald A. Vizenor

Shadow Distance

Gerald A. Vizenor

<P>Author of The Heirs of Columbus, Hotline Healers, Interior Landscapes, Crossbloods, and numerous other works, Gerald Vizenor is one of the century's most important and prolific Native American writers. Drawing on the best work of an acclaimed career, Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader reveals the wide range of his imagination and the evolution of his central themes.</P><P>This compelling collection includes not only selections from Vizenor's innovative fiction, but also poetry, autobiography, essays, journalism, and the previously unpublished screenplay «Harold of Orange,» winner of the Film-in-the-Cities national screenwriting competition.</P><P>Whether focusing on Native American tricksters or legal and financial claims of tribal sovereignty, Vizenor continually underscores the diversities of modern traditions, the mixed ethnicity that characterizes those who claim Native American origin, and cultural permeability of an increasingly commercial, global world.</P><P>A. Robert Lee of the University of Kent at Canterbury, England, provides a lucid introduction to this writer whose «radically self-aware and contemporary satiric tricksterism… as easily invokes Jabés, Barthes, Lyotard, or Foucault as bear ceremonial, ghost dance, or dream-catcher.»</P>

Favor of Crows

Gerald A. Vizenor

<P>Favor of Crows is a collection of new and previously published original haiku poems over the past forty years. Gerald Vizenor has earned a wide and devoted audience for his poetry. In the introductory essay the author compares the imagistic poise of haiku with the early dream songs of the Anishinaabe, or Chippewa. Vizenor concentrates on these two artistic traditions, and by intuition he creates a union of vision, perception, and natural motion in concise poems; he creates a sense of presence and at the same time a naturalistic trace of impermanence. </P><P>The haiku scenes in Favor of Crows are presented in chapters of the four seasons, the natural metaphors of human experience in the tradition of haiku in Japan. Vizenor honors the traditional practice and clever tease of haiku, and conveys his appreciation of Matsuo Basho and Yosa Buson in these two haiku scenes, «calm in the storm / master basho soaks his feet /water striders,» and «cold rain / field mice rattle the dishes / buson's koto.»</P><P>Vizenor is inspired by the sway of concise poetic images, natural motion, and by the transient nature of the seasons in native dream songs and haiku. «The heart of haiku is a tease of nature, a concise, intuitive, and an original moment of perception,» he declares in the introduction to Favor of Crows. «Haiku is visionary, a timely meditation and an ironic manner of creation. That sense of natural motion in a haiku scene is a wonder, the catch of impermanence in the seasons.» Check for the online reader's companion at favorofcrows.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>