[Bruchac is a Native American educator, poet, and editor who has edited numerous works on Native American authors and literatures. Below, he offers a highly favorable assessment of The Mama Poems.]

With the release of [The Mama Poems], Maurice Kenny moves closer towards achieving recognition as a major figure among American writers. Already seen by some critics as one of the 4 or 5 most significant Native American poets, Kenny speaks in The Mama Poems with a distinctive voice, one shaped by the rhythms of Mohawk life and speech, yet one which both defines and moves beyond cultural boundaries.

The Mama Poems is, somewhat like his earlier volume of poems centering around the figure of the Jesuit missionary Father Isaac Jogues, Black Robe, a flow of voices. The voices in this new book, though, are not those of historical figures. They are the voices of the poet himself—in childhood and at crucial points in the painful, powerful relationship with his family—and the voice of his mother, sometimes as an echo, sometimes (in the flatly powerful "Telephone Call") as a direct monologue.

The world which Kenny opens for us is personal, yet never sentimental. The two prose poems for his mother which open and close the book, "1911" and "1982" are like the covers of a family album, presenting and enclosing this private universe. It is a world in which long-dead relatives can appear when they are needed, in which the drum sounds in rituals of curing; a world vibrant with the natural landscape of blackberry bushes, pine trees, animals and birds.

        birds weren't caged
        when I was a kid
        growing with mountains
 
        an old man might keep a crow
        on his shoulder
        but it could fly
        into alders when its mate called …
                                    from "Birds"

As the book progresses, moving more or less chronologically through the poet's life and concluding with his mother's death and his attempts at an elegy, Kenny presents us with an experience which all of us share—the unpreventable loss of loved ones.

        I used to believe in the powers of death.
        Until you died.
        It was the last belief.
        I believe in echoes now,
        in earth that holds you. I believe in a bird,
        its flight, though I am not sure which one, hawk
        or seagull …
                             from "May 15, 1982"

The transcendence which he finds is not simplistic or facile, nor does it reek of the easy and painless mysticism which certain recent imitators of Native American culture have foisted upon the public. But when one concludes the book, one feels that the dedication on the first page—juxtaposed with a section from the Iroquois story of Creation—has been justified. Speaking to his relatives, those living and dead, Kenny says: "… we are together again."