[In the following review, Lerner presents a favorable assessment of Going to War with All My Relations.]

Because Wendy Rose is both a poet and a professional anthropologist and is acutely conscious of both her Indian and her European ancestry, she is uniquely situated to perceive both analytically and imaginatively the complexities of Indian experience in America. Her eighth book [Going to War with All My Relations], balancing characteristic earlier poems and recent uncollected work, is a valuable survey of her poetic career and an indication of her present concerns.

Rose has always revealed a true lyric gift, but it has been accompanied by a considerable moral energy, as in "Notes on a Conspiracy," written in 1977 and reprinted here. This poem originated in her indignation at archeological and commercial exploitation of Indian burial remains. What makes it an important text in the canon of American Indian literature is its balance—its dismay not only at the callousness of the commerce but also at the past failure of Indian resistance—and its haunting perception that perhaps the saddest figure is the archeologist who, digging in sacred ground, cannot understand his own fate: "He does not feel the point of his own probing trowel."

Much of Rose's energy originates in painful memory of her mixed origins (Indian, German, English, Scottish). Her father gave her a Hopi identity which was only racial, and her fate—to discover Hopi culture only by an act of will and professional study—is reflected in the last line of an early poem about her father: "I grow but do not live." In spite of this, her mixed ancestry has always been a source of her strength and wisdom. A recent poem, significantly titled "If I Am Too Brown or Too White for You," makes clear her recognition that her impulse to poetry derives from that complex ancestry, and her beautiful tribute to a German pioneer great-great-grandmother ends with her recognition that German and American Indian historical experience, though not simultaneous, are parallel: "Do you remember the tribes / that so loved their land / before the roll / of Roman wheels?"

These poems seem more effective, both as art and as moral statement, than those which are more consciously and explicitly "social." "Yellow Ribbons, Baghdad 1991," for example, is an attempt—unsuccessful in my view—to equate Iraqi civilians killed in the Gulf War with the victims of the Sand Creek massacre. Much more successful and certainly more moving are those poems which derive from the concerns expressed in her explanation in her preface of the terms of the book's title. The "war" is our common struggle to maintain our "relations" to one another, to all living things, and to the maternal earth. The maternal principle appears again and again in the poems and is implicit in "To the Vision Seekers, Remember This," in which scientists are asked to remember that all science derives from the earth itself: "it is women, / all women, where you come from, / Earth the one to remember."

Going to War with All My Relations, a significant achievement by an important poet, suggests that the revelation of the ambiguities inherent in the historical interrelationship of Indian and European elements in our culture continues to be the great task for American poets.