Rooms

"Rooms" is a collection of new and selected poems by Diane Glancy. The rooms are spaces from previous collections - spaces influenced by memory and the pull of the past on the present. This collection of poems walks a line between balance and imbalance and struggles for an alignment of fragmented experiences. It tries to put into perspective the disparities of survival. It seeks to reconcile history and a broken heritage that results from a collision of cultures. These poems, written from 1986-2004, include work from earlier collections, "The Relief Of America", "The Shadow's Horse", "Stones For A Pillow", "(Ado)Ration", "Boom Town", "Lone Dog's Winter Count", "Iron Woman", "One Age In A Dream", "Offering", and a chapbook, "Coyote's Quodlibet". The title is taken from an idea, The Ames Room, which was a demonstration created by Dartmouth Professor Adelbert Ames in the 1940's to show that we can look into an off-sided room, yet it will appear in proportion because the way we think something should be shapes our perception of it. If the mind is a trickster shaping the misshapen into a familiar form and setting upright what has been turned on its side, what does a lopsided perception do? Does it skew what is not skewed? What if history, in this case, Native American history, has been turned on its side? How does the off-sided perception of the vanquished warp normal experience? "Rooms" is a calling together of the tribes. These poems are a campground of voices in council.

Table of Contents

The Ordinary Shape of Rooms The Ordinary Shape of Rooms Asylum in the Grasslands Buffalo Medicine If I were to tell a story Boarding School for Indian Women Meatloaf Asylum in the Grasslands He Opens and Closes the Store Fodder Returning on an Oklahoma Backroad Late at Night with 139,000 Miles on my Car The Relief of America Christopher Buffalo Jump, Blue Mounds, Minnesota Oklahoma Land Run Giving the Air Away Cinnamon Bear, Field Museum, Chicago The Shadow's Horse Tuning Story The Stockyard Series: Remuda Crow Standing Rez They Handed Out Bible Verses Like Oars Driving Words look for a place to belong Stones for a Pillow The Ladder The Swimmer A Cab Nowhere To Be Seen Leonard de Vinci's Monna Lisa dite La Joconde, The Stones for a Pillow Lone Dog's Winter Count Hamatawk Lone Dog's Winter Count Portrait of the Artist as Indian Here I Am Standing Beside Myself Homework Truck Stop on Highway 80 near Walcott, Iowa Portrait of the Lone Survivor Kemo Sabe The First Reader, Santee Training School, 1873 Coyote's Quodlibet Coyote's Shyness Coyote Meets the Bird Maker Coyote thinks of story as a living being Coyote's Skyness Coyote's Vision (Ado)ration You know the Indian Homage Buffalo Trip You know them by their stealing The light of (ado)ration Well you push your mind along the road Air for Flute Stop Waves in the Fold of the Lake (Ado)ration Theology of Deer One Age in a Dream If Words Were Shapen in the Animal Head Squirrels Bride Means Cook Pasture for Rent Iron Woman Without Title Iron Woman Aunt Fannie Fixes Bison Bourguignon I Am Not the Woman I Am Totem First Lieutenant Marine Plague Boom Town The Rain Stealer A Share of the Stair (or As I'm Talking I'm Becoming What I Say) Grand Portage Casino Slipping into what will hold onto Kissing the Sun Wyoming A condensation during flight Offering Great Great Grandmother Steps into the Room Reservation Solar Eclipse The Spirit Blesses You w/ Hardship Some Thoughts on Our Uncommon Language Photo Frames #1-10, Kansas City Stockyards (Or How to be Indian) Rooms House Rooms

Reviews

[Glancy's] poetry incorporates a lot of different formal strategies, including compound words, and a strategic use of spacing, italics, and captials... Reaching back into the community and staying connected with one's family seems central to [her] writing -- acts that are fueled by the power of memory. -- Jennifer Andrews The American Indian Quarterly

About the Author

Diane Glancy is a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she teaches Native American Literature and Creative Writing. She was awarded a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the 2003 Juniper Poetry Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press for Primer of the Obsolete. Her recent collections of poetry are The Shadow's Horse and The Relief of America. Her novels include Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, The Mask Maker and The Man Who Heard the Land.

Prizes

Delivered by a voice at once tough and vital, shaped by a sensibility which is sharply aware of tragedy yet open to opportunity, these dry, exemplary poems are quite undeceived by this world -- yet touching loyal to it. -- John Redmond Diane Glancy's Rooms is a masterpiece of poetic clarity and "abstraction": the clarity of belonging, of totemic relationship with land, animals, environment, and the spirituality of her people, but also the abstractions of Western thought that's brought its aesthetic removals from what is. Glancy is a highly sophisticated poet of "both" worlds, of different heritages, but her Cherokee nation and responsibility call through all else -- heritage becomes more than a storehouse of language and stories, it becomes the essence of language and belonging. This is a revolutionary work. -- John Kinsella To praise a poet's eye has, on occasion, been deemed disingenuous praise, privileging, as it does, the poet's precise but secretarial transcription of the visible. In Glancy's case, the keen (and keening?) vision avails far more than is immediately apparent -- correspondences both semantic and mythic, affinities both historic and current -- bringing into view for the rest of us an exhilarating vista, a genuinely visionary scene in which we find, quite surprisingly, ourselves, seeing more clearly. -- Scott Cairns Diane Glancy creates memorable poetry in every phrase, gesture, metaphor, and tease of ordinary time and place. "Rooms: New and Selected Poems" is an occasion of delights and medicine. -- Gerald Vizenor

From The Publisher:

Speaking out of the known world, this powerful selection of Diane Glancy's poems transforms experience through new narratives, mytholigising history and social crisis. Tackling themes of disruption, loss and heritage, these poems invoke a wide range of familial and animal personae and environments: we find ourselves guided to a land filled with hope.