The new North Dakota license plate blends romantic figures from the state's territorial past (Sakajawea, the Seventh Cavalry, Teddy Roosevelt) with objects from its present (a curve of highway, a farm silo, the capitol tower) to form what must be the most complicated image on any of the fifty states' license plates. Old Glory, in the middle of the montage, doubling as Teddy's gesticulating arm and a backdrop for Custer's unit, draws the hodgepodge together. It is a cluttered logo, though not without some power to stir. Teddy's bull head and upraised, scolding finger suggest he is bellowing orders to the cavalrymen below him. The cavalry itself marches smartly into the letters and numbers, guidons flapping. Such are the broad, imprecise lines of public myth. Never mind that Custer led a significant proportion of his unit to annihilation under very compromised circumstances; forget that the Rough Rider's Dakota cattle ranch failed in the snows of an uncooperating winter. The citizens need bold imagery, giants to boast about, something to counter South Dakota's Mount Rushmore.

Louise Erdrich's Jacklight knows another North Dakota, a place of ordinary people—Native and European Americans—who live in the footprints of the giants and the wreckage they left behind. Some of her citizens even know these romances are dangerous. In “Dear John Wayne,” a carful of Indians laughs at the clichés of a Western at the local drive-in. But since it is Wayne's face that fills the screen, “a horizon of teeth,” Wayne whom the crowd cheers, Wayne who wins, they too are seduced, somewhat, by the romance of the John Wayne West:

We get into the car
scratching our mosquito bites, speechless and small
as people are when the movie is done.
We are back in our skins.
How can we help but keep hearing his voice,
the flip side of the sound track, still playing:
Come on, boys, we got them
where we want them, drunk, running.
They'll give us what we want, what we need.

Some of her white plains people also know the painful complexities denied and papered over by the public myths. Mary Kröger, the central figure in “The Butcher's Wife” (a rich, long sequence comprising about a third of the book), says to herself at one point, drunk and staring at the clouds passing overhead:

We lay our streets over
the deepest cries of the earth
and wonder why everything comes to this:
The days pile and pile.
The bones are too few
and too foreign to know.
Mary, you do not belong here at all.

But these are the words of her more reflective, insightful characters, the few who through accidents of sensibility and personal history can see behind the masks. Others are less fortunate. Ray Twobears, “on his third new car in half as many years,” blots all possibility of such vision with alcohol. A three-foot snapping turtle, whose head he has blown off with a cherry bomb, drags itself “up a slight hill and over / into a small stream that deepens into a marsh,” while Ray sleeps “his own head off.” It is a horrifying analogue of Twobears' own brutal, blind, crawling survival. No tormented ambiguities there.

No poem dramatizes the torture of clinging ostensibly to public myths while knowing better inside than “Captivity.” Erdrich condenses and reworks Mary Rowlandson's seventeenth century captivity narrative into six eerily lyrical stanzas. Like Rowlandson, the speaker of the poem, safe in her husband's bed again, can no longer sleep the night. “Rescued, I see no truth in things.” Her experience among her Indian captors has forever destroyed her set of cozy certainties. She can never again see the world with the Manichean clarities of a General Custer, a John Wayne, or the Puritan husband whose bed she again shares: “And in the dark I see myself / as I was outside their circle.”

Louise Erdrich displays other voices in this first volume. There are love poems, occasional pieces, a wonderful, bawdy account of what must be a Chippewa folk tale, “Old Man Potchikoo.” But the book's main energy radiates from its many strong characters, the people of the small towns and reservations whose daily lives challenge Chamber of Commerce romance. The people of Jacklight are so well-defined, so interconnected with each other and with the actual history of the plains they inhabit (“The Butcher's Wife” reads like a novella in poetry) that Erdrich's novel Love Medicine seems a natural unfolding of what begins so well here in the poetry. Her work fills an important space in our evolving, collective knowledge of who we really are.