[In the following review, Berner calls After and Before the Lightning Ortiz's "most powerful achievement to date."]

The Acoma poet Simon Ortiz spent the winter of 1985-86—the date can be determined by his reference to the Challenger disaster of January 1986—as a visiting professor at Sinte Gleska College on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. That year and the profound culture shock which he experienced, caused less by his dealings with the Lakota Sioux of the reservation than by the awesome Dakota prairie and its frightening weather, required a search for "a way to deal with the reality of my life and the reality in which I lived." The result is less a collection of poems, though it is that, than a poetic journal containing poems and prose notes dated from late autumn to the first day of the following spring—the Dakota winter between autumn's last lightning and the first lightning of spring.

The prairie Ortiz experienced is a hard place where brutal work is normal for those who hope to endure, where dreams are smashed, where even murder can occur, but above all where winter and the lonely landscape are a test of character; and to the child of the Great Plains who writes this review, the language Ortiz uses to render the reality of that world seems exactly right. It is a place of "blistering cold," the wind's "deeply throated frozen moan," and an "icy sunlight glistening off snow-fields," and the sun viewed through a few trees is "so low I have to bend down to see it." "Nothing," he says in one poem, "can measure distance here," and in "this South Dakota wind and snow, a destiny we cannot deny," Ortiz came to terms with himself, with his place and time, and with humanity's place in a cosmos which seems more immediate on the plains than anywhere else and where driving the long strip of US 18 is like "travelling on the farthest reaches of the galactic universe."

Some readers may think many of the poems too sketchy to stand by themselves; but they work in the context of the steady progression of the season they chronicle, and most of them in fact can stand by themselves and indeed are very strong. They deal with universal concerns: with the recognition of mortality while chopping wood ("Comprehending") or driving blind for two seconds after a huge truck passes by in a storm ("Blind Curse"), with the mingled guilt and gratitude felt while cooking venison ("What We Come to Know"), with an abandoned farm and the poet's imagined farmer whose courageous story must be told ("A Story of Courage"). These poems, and for that matter Ortiz's book itself, must be considered his most powerful achievement to date, a major event in the current movement of American Indian poetry, and in fact a significant contribution to our literature in general.