David Wagoner's Who Shall Be the Sun? contains both direct retellings of American Indian legends and his own lyrics based on attitudes, understandings, and experiences of the Northwestern tribes. Most white literature on Indian themes is suspect; much is specious; but Wagoner's poems, I believe, are true, and certainly they are compelling. He is a fine poet to begin with, whose work over the past two decades has probably not been given its due, and he is close, I think very close, to Indian sensibility. He knows enough to write in his own language, English, and in his own convention of prosody, contemporary American, yet the feeling in his work, like the substance, has been distinctly learned. More, it has been earned, and the effort of that is a power in its own fruition. Here is one stanza, taken from the middle of a song:

            My spirit, when it first came,
            Made a hole in my mind,
            And I fell down, dreaming
            What I must do and be
            Through the long fire of my life.

This is not only the literalness of shamanistic mysticism but also its true feeling; yet conveyed somehow—to think out how would take years—in words and images that seem not strange to us, that seem in fact closely allied to our own, the world's, experience. In many of his Indian poems, Wagoner touches at once the form of Indian, and the content of universal, awareness. It is a remarkable achievement. (p. 89)