Kenny, Maurice - Robert L. Berner (review date Autumn 1988)
Robert L. Berner (review date Autumn 1988)
SOURCE: A review of Between Two Rivers: Selected Poems 1956–1984, in World Literature Today, Vol. 62, No. 4, Autumn, 1988, p. 709.
[In the following review, Berner surveys the strengths and themes of Kenny's poetry.]
For three decades the work of the Mohawk poet Maurice Kenny has been largely ignored by the literary establishment but has been widely admired by the present generation of young Indian poets for its service to the old idea that poetry, before it is anything else, is an oral art. We can only hope that the handsome retrospective Between Two Rivers will bring his work to a larger audience.
Though Kenny is deeply committed to Iroquois traditions, he has at various stages of his career produced work which reveals a wide knowledge of other Indian cultures and a great sympathy for the condition of Indian people everywhere. "I Am the Sun," for example, is a sequence of...
[The entire page is 428 words long]
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