[In the following review, Bellm offers an overview of Harjo's career.]

In one of Joy Harjo's new poems [from In Mad Love and War], a jazz musician brings trombone music home to his Papago tribe: "They had never heard anything like it," she writes, "but it was the way they had remembered." In another, a roomful of hardcore drinkers on the coldest night of the year is startled when a new stripper walks into the bar; they immediately know she is a Deer Dancer, a "myth slipped down through dreamtime," a creature of magic from "a people accustomed to hearing songs in pine trees, and making them hearts." Coming upon these poems for the first time is like walking into a new world, too—then recognizing where you are. Time isn't linear. The past and future are happening now. Many worlds exist, and can converge. Dreams carry the same weight as physical evidence, are solid as rock and bone. It becomes apparent that these things aren't just true in the world of Native American spirituality; they're simply true. An Oklahomaborn member of the Creek Nation, fully at home both in Native ways and in the more recent "main" stream of American culture, Joy Harjo is now writing a visionary poetry that is among the very best we have.

In traditional Native story and song, writes Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo/Sioux), the aesthetics are grounded in kinship; what makes art beautiful is its communality, its expression of tribal values of proportion, harmony, and balance. The Navajo equivalent of "beautiful," Harjo writes in Secrets From the Center of the World is "an all-encompassing word, like those for land and sky, that has to do with living well, dreaming well, in a way that is complementary to all life." The poet is anonymous because poetry doesn't come from individuals; it comes from ancestor spirits and powerful dreams. Harjo's work draws from the river of Native tradition, but it also swims freely in the currents of Anglo-American verse—feminist poetry of personal/political resistance, deep-image poetry of the unconscious, "new-narrative" explorations of story and rhythm in prose-poem form. Not to mention the jazz riffs (Harjo plays the tenor sax) that swirl steadily through her latest book, In Mad Love and War.

"Healing Animal" is a fine example of this way of living in a many-layered world:

       Sleep, your back curled
       against my belly.
       I will make you something to
       drink, / from a cup of frothy
       stars
       from the somewhere there is
       the perfect sound
       called up from the best-told
       stories / of benevolent gods,
       who have nothing better to
       do. / And I ask you
       what bitter words are ruining
       your soft-skinned village,
       because I want to make a
       poem that will cup / the
       inside of your throat
       like the fire in the palm of a
       healing animal. Like
       the way Coltrane knew love in
       the fluid shape
       of a saxophone / that could
       change into the wings of a
       blue angel….

As in a shaman's ritual prayer-chant, as in jazz music, healing power in this poem is the free flight of improvisation, a way of changing one thing into another. The potion is a fluid shape in a cup, in the throat, in the palm of an animal's hand—a brew of frothy stars, perfect sound, love and fire. The body is a soft-skinned village, a community, an entire world. Many of the poems in She Had Some Horses (1983) use the prayer-chant tradition of healing, the original "talking cure," more explicitly. In "The Black Room," the nightmare of a childhood rape is punctuated by the repeated line, "She thought she woke up." The title poem is a long litany of the "horses" inside a woman who is trying to become whole. In her new book, Harjo has moved further away from traditional song forms, and as a result, some readers will probably miss what they liked best about the earlier work. But In Mad Love and War is a strong leap forward; while the poems may appear less "Indian" on the surface, they have a stronger connection to tradition, which makes them freer to soar madly, risk everything, and spiral back again. The image of the spiral, "the structure of the spiraled world," recurs constantly in Mad Love. "Our bones are built of spirals"; stories are spirals; time is a spiral; the "Muscogee season of forgiveness, time of new corn," is marked by a spiraling dance. In "Fury of Rain," she writes,

       We are all in the belly of a
       laughing god
       swimming the heavens, in
       this whirling circle.
       What we haven't imagined
       will one day
       spit us out
       magnificent and simple.

For Harjo, to live in the world is to live inside a breathing, sentient being. There are voices in the landscape; the ground speaks; things have memory. Other forms of life "have their tribes, their families, their histories, too," she says. "They are alive poems."

This doesn't mean that Harjo idealizes the natural world, or the spirit world, or Native culture; she looks and listens to know what these worlds are. The whirling circle includes murder, convulsive change, "dazzling" anger, the ravages of "the alcohol spirit." Many of Harjo's characters are "beautiful native misfits" or "broken survivors"—a woman hanging from a 13th floor window ready to jump, the Deer Dancer in the bar, a wise elder with no home who sleeps out on a sidewalk in the snow. The poems forage for sustenance in the desert, change fear to love, turn destruction into "the epic search for grace."

Inevitably, the question of physical and cultural survival is bound up with the land, which not only feeds a people but nourishes who they are. "It's true the landscape forms the mind." Harjo writes in Secrets From the Center of the World (1989). "If I stand here long enough I'll learn how to sing. None of that country & western heartbreak stuff, or operatic duels, but something cool as the blues, or close to the sound of a Navajo woman singing early in the morning." Secrets is a rather unlikely experiment that turned into a satisfying and beautiful book, a kind of trickster in the age-old tradition of Coyote, Rabbit, and Crow. On alternating pages facing Harjo's brief prose poems, Stephen Strom presents photographs of vast Navajo-country desert landscapes as 4 × 4 miniatures, tiny eye-sized windows on immense space. The one close-up looks like a panoramic view of sand dunes; the photograph before it, which looks like a close-up of a river bottom, turns out to be a distant aerial view of mud hills. As Harjo notes, the pictures "emphasize the 'not-separate' that is within and that moves harmoniously upon the landscape." The depth of field is an emblem of tribal vision.

The book's best poems enhance this play of scale and perspective, suggesting in very few words the relationship between a human life and millennial history. Next to a view of red desert, an abstract swirl of sand shaped by wind, she places this tiny but large story: "Two sisters meet on horseback. They gossip: a cousin eloped with someone's husband, twins were born to his wife. One is headed toward Tsaile, and the other to Round Rock. Their horses are rose sand, with manes of ashy rock." Another poem sketches out evolution, the synchronicity of time and the convergence of the seen and unseen, all in four sentences:

Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the drying stone. Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers' descendants, who are going to the store.

A few of the poems do seem too closely bound by what the photographs already say, or settle for a quick-and-easy poeticism that rarely appears in Harjo's other books: "Approaching in the distance is the child you were some years ago. See her laughing as she chases a white butterfly." But a more common objection to Harjo's work concerns its occasional diffuseness, a way of stating connections in a poem instead of actively reaching them.

While this is fairly true of the earlier books, it is also largely the objection of readers who stand outside the tradition of Native poetry, in which a poem is less important on its own than in its relationship to the whole body of knowledge, and in which many connections—between a cedar tree and prayer, say, or between stars and the religion of ghost dancers—can be assumed in the minds of the listeners.

In Mad Love and War is the farthest-ranging of Harjo's four books; it is both the wildest and the most disciplined. There are poems about Nicaragua and about a lynching by the Ku Klux Klan, poems about Charlie Parker and Nat King Cole, a dream song in the vision-quest tradition in which a woman warrior sics dogs on her lover across the ice of the Bering Strait. But some of my favorite poems are the quietest—like "Crystal Lake," about a young girl out fishing with her grandfather and feeling "restless in adolescent heat." Or "Summer Night":

       There is an ache that begins/
       in the sound of an old blues
       song.
       It becomes a house where all
       the lights have gone out/but
       one.
       And it burns and burns/ until
       there is only the blue smoke
       of dawn
       and everyone is sleeping in
       someone's arms/ even the
       flowers
       even the sound of a thousand
       silences./ And the arms of
       night
       in the arms of day./ Everyone
       except me.
       But then the smell of damp
       honeysuckle twisted on the
       vine.
       And the turn of the shoulder/
       of the ordinary spirit who
       keeps watch
       over this ordinary street./ And
       there you are, the secret
       of your own flower of light/
       blooming in the miraculous
       dark.

Joy Harjo's poetry continually displays this humble, startled consciousness, as in the 19th century Pawnee dream song which asks: "Let us see, is this real, / Let us see, is this real, / This life I am living? / You, Gods, who dwell everywhere, / Let us see, is this real, / This life I am living?" Sometimes youhave to stay awake all night, attuned to the ordinary spirit of the street, just listening to how the answer keeps changing.

Dan Bellm, "Ode to Joy," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXXVI, No. 14, April 2, 1991, p. 78.