Song of the Sky: Versions of Native American Songs and Poems

From Library Journal Based on the work of anthropologist collectors, this compendium of more than 100 Native American chants and songs revises and updates a prior edition out of print since 1989. These poems are not translations, argues Swann. They’re versions that have gone through a series of mediations and filters and exist somewhere between the individual lyric voice and a diverse, multileveled Native American imaginative-mystical identity. Whether versions, translations, or poems, whether sung at a Crazy Dance, potlatch, corn-grinding, or curative or marriage ceremony, whether celebrating buffalo, maize, red fox, or tobacco, these works capture the otherness of the primeval spirit of the Native American fusion of natural and supernatural, animal and deity. Originally performed aloud, these verbal artifacts–which are sometimes breathtakingly pure, sometimes obscure–reveal that there can be no conventional or single notion of the Indian.