The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems by N. Scott Momaday

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems by N. Scott Momaday Sean Teuton (bio) The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems by N. Scott Momaday HarperCollins, 2020 N. SCOTT MOMADAY'S The Death of Sitting Bear welcomes readers on a poetic journey. His preface to this large collection of 217 poems shares the Kiowa author's early experience of the sanctity of words that "give life to my mind" (xiii). In a brief statement on his poetics, Momaday describes a dream in which a recitation of Beowulf "transport[s]" an ancient child (xiii); the author clarifies that he wishes similarly to transport readers and invites us to accompany him on his poetic quest. The poet gently invites us into his world, where we witness all the color, sound, and texture of a mythic place. In "Song of Longing," the poet begins: "Will you come to me now / You must know that in the firelight / I wait for you with longing" (57). While Momaday's words entice and enrapture us, he honors various traditional poetic forms. At this collection's center lie "one hundred haiku . . . to nourish the mind" (118). In his "Visitation at Amherst," Momaday honors the form of his "muse" with this Dickinsonian quatrain: "She must have mused for centuries. / Celestial buttons at her eyes, / Until no mould could crust her soul, / Whirling in the wind of words" (66). Momaday alters Dickinson's typically alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter iambics to maintain iambic tetrameter throughout. In "The Whale in Amber," he employs a sestina but without its characteristic three-line envoy: "A broken beach lies there beyond / the rutted road. The wood / inclines landward to the sky. / Now is the quick quality / of regenerated blood, / the present that does not die" (47). In rhyming second and fifth, third and sixth lines with "wood" and "blood," "sky" and "die," the poet invites us to connect these otherwise disparate words. The rhyme, along with the repeated enjambment and alliteration of a "broken beach," "rutted road," and "quick quality" employ sound to communicate death's abrupt completion to each human's mystifying life record. Elsewhere Momaday delights in repeating entire phrases, such as in the poem, "There Came a Ghost," in which the spectral figure appears "illuminated within / As by the moon." Seven and ten lines later he returns, "And illuminated as by the moon. / . . . Illuminated by the moon" (145). Momaday embraces form, but ultimately the linguistic frolic of a child at play—Momaday's most sacred poetic voice. [End Page 133] This voice reaches ancient cave drawings and hunting chants in a world resplendent with light, texture, and sound. In "The Spheres," Momaday consecrates form, the ancient, and the world in a single poem. The poet muses on Aristotle's vision of the universe, where spheres operate in synchronous motion set to music and we, the dead, cannot fathom their brilliance: "One by one we enter that eternity, remembering / The chimes of mere mortality, and / fire, then embers, then ash" (141). Elsewhere Momaday seeks to recall a crystalline image of an arctic dawn, a beloved Russian linguist, a cathedral in the Pyrenees, a Siberian hunter. Indigenous readers will appreciate the poet's search for the marrow of life, a life's journey that leads him well beyond his Kiowa ancestral home at Rainy Mountain, beyond Canyon de Chelly in Navajo country, and into a new world of humanity's beliefs and wonder. To begin the book's title poem, "The Death of Sitting Bear," the speaker contemplates a photograph of a revered Kiowa warrior, Sitting Bear, who sat for his portrait while captured and confined at Fort Sill in 1870. Momaday comments on his ancestor: "The cultural principles by which he lived without compromise—bravery, steadfastness, generosity, and truth—have different meanings . . . in our time . . . . I believe, so does the concept of death" (122–123). The poet then hears Sitting Bear, in first person, tell of the ancient Kiowa migration: "In me a memory of the ancestral north" (125). As Momaday shares this tribal epic, Sitting Bear laments the tragic loss of his son and his carrying the boy's bones home: "I placed...