[In the following review, Loudon offers favorable criticism of Jacklight.]

Designating someone's “first book of poems” as such is typically an apologetic strategy. For Erdrich, “first-rate,” “first ground,” and “first light” are more descriptive of the forty-four poems of Jacklight. I felt early in the reading the same narrative force, precise images, and complex characters that eventually found full expression in her celebrated novel Love Medicine (1984), but the poems are far from mere exercises on the way to a novel. They are first-rate poems: the language again and again sings to its own vision. An ordinary event in the cycle of seasons, the falling of blossoms, becomes “White crowns of the plum trees / were filling the purple throats of the iris”; or consider the reflection of parents: “We are alone here on earth / with the ragged breath of our children / coming and going in the old wool blankets.” I am humbled before a committed language expressing courage tempered by fear.

The ground of Erdrich's poems is the region of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation in North Dakota, but political boundaries alone cannot suppress the fragmentary cultures of the Chippewa, Cree, French, English, Scottish, and German legacies of the people who stand in the midst of degradation, rejecting self-pity and improvising their strength from whatever is around them. Repetitions (evoking the mythic light upon which she draws throughout the book) and stunning images (Neruda and James Wright resonate within them) build the insistent will of characters who continue when “everything around … is crying to be gone.” Such a character, “who drank Vitalis [and] Sterno” but “is the green light floating over the slough,” in the haunting “Rugaroo,” is one of many that “will not let you sleep.” Mary Kröger, the widowed central persona of the long sequence “The Butcher's Wife,” is another; in “New Vows” she sorts through the sorrows of her life and of those around her, until “shadows move freely within [her] as words” and she discovers “the trick was in living that death to its source.”

From that source, the oral tradition, Erdrich's poems reach first light. Her last section weaves myth and memory, the Windigo and the White Roach Bar, toward a moving eulogy for her grandfather; yet the eulogy becomes affirmation for all humanity “of this clay” who have known “the absence / of birds in a nest.” Each of us coming to these poems will have the jacklight turned upon himself (jacklight: any light used to lure game in night hunting—usually “illegal”). Each of us will have to find his way “forward alone.”