A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales

Joy Harjo is one of my favorite poets.Her love of themes from her Native American heritage results in poetry that is moving and allows us to better understand the culture it springs from. Our new Poet Laureate writes poetry that is truly American and accessible to every reader.

Author Joy Harjo's A Map to the Next World is a collection of poems and tales separated between four distinct yet interconnecting parts. Within the main sections of the book Harjo shares many emotions, events, and thoughts reflecting on the many themes, tropes, and topics. All of which are representations of Joy Harjo's cultural perspective as a female, American Indian, and Mvskoke author; however these are also representation of her human perspective of the world. Joy Harjo has allowed both readers of Native and non-Native backgrounds to approach the book of poetry by accessing commonalities and mutual understandings of the world as a whole. A centralized theme throughout much of the collection is the cycles, circles, and the cyclical nature of life, experiences, and perspectives. The spiral being both a very visual element throughout the book in the cover images, section title page images, and title images of all the poems there in. This is one of the strongest points in which this text works with ideas and the readers. Other major and minor topics and themes most notably found throughout the poems include: cycles, memory, love, history, land, grace, culture, spirits, deities, religion, conflict, language, enemies, evil, colonization, growth, customs, body, mind, skin, race, gender, and age. This collection of poems, however, is not limited in the discussions of these listed topics and themes yet have many fields of discussion.Accompanying the collection of poems includes a Notes section reserved for word definitions of the Native community which Joy Harjo has utilized. These communities include her Mvskoke: Creek Nation community and her Hawaiian community, but also including words and references outside these communities such as the words from the Diné and her association to Southwestern culture. This collection of poems and tales is an essential component when looking to understand not only the views and perspectives of the Mvskoke Native American community but also a look into a new perspective in and of itself. As it is classified as an American Indian text it is still highly accessible to readers of non-Native Mvskoke backgrounds. In my own opinion, this is a collection of poems which moves to break down the consistent separation of cultures, and instead embarks to show not a separation but a connectedness. Although Joy Harjo is emphasizing a culture here, she is also using her most prominent theme of cycles to promote this idea of inter connectedness. Many of her poems show and represent life as life, whether seen through the eyes of her Mvskoke voice or the lives of her Native and non-Native readers alike. Here work in this collection cannot go without acknowledgement of her female perspective, as it too is very important. One of the many themes and tropes that I picked up on are the aspects of birth, motherhood, rebirth, foundations etc. Especially seen in Part 1: Songline of the Dawn, there is an overall sense of a beginning of time, a beginning of the day. Harjo skillfully creates a peace and harmony throughout the collection of poems and tales. One of the main reason I see this text becoming a good candidate for many audiences to read and understand the perspectives of a female Native Mvskoke author is due to the tone of the text. This text is not one which attempts to charge and blame those of non-Native decent, but instead looks to supply more accurate views and expressions of a native culture and native idea. Although some poems may initially express hurt, pain, and discomfort through title such as the poem "The War Zone," the purpose of these poems are not to repeatedly criticize anyone, yet they are to prompt theologies, spiritualties, and concepts of life and the world. Joy Harjo does well to represent both very personal experiences and thoughts with issues and themes of Native American Mvskoke poetry, without excluding her non-Native or other Native readers. The readers are still allowed to actively learn these experiences and theologies; in doing so they also comprise an understanding of Harjo and can theorize with her. This collection of poems is successful in the creation of discourse and understanding among its readers and should be contended when one is looking to learn more about an Mvskoke literature, as well as a feminine literature and a world literature.

Floating in lyrical waters of love, passion, fear, and destruction. Joy Harjo shines light on the beauty and brutality which dwells in our worlds, because it is her song, one she has lived and continues to sing.

Joy Harjo's new collection hums on the page and reaches for each of us to shift our perceptions. Though the layout of the book does grow slightly repetitious at times, it bears repeating and is evident why Harjo chose to include her "tales," as she calls them, interspersed with her restrained poems: with _Map to the Next World_ she is creating her own mythological world using the stories of her Native American ancestry as a backdrop. And, it seems, she's recreating this world we live in.With each new poem, she cultivates a new awareness of the world, pushes us to view our world in a new way. This is what poetry should do, obvious as it may seem, but it is what too much poetry does not. In her poem, "Emergence" she proves her collection concerns itself as much with the trappings of this world than with what will and must come next if we proceed to live independent of past, starving our present and future. "I remember," she writes, "when there was no urge/to cut the land or each other into pieces,/when we knew how to think/in beautiful."Harjo pushes us to confront our lives and the denial omnipresent throughout them. In "Forgetting," she writes, "Forget history and how it has a way/of looping until you slap up against the chest/of an enemy who desires you and hates himself/for loving himself in you." This poet refuses to let us forget, will not allow us to deny that we all live in this same world, and our descendants will live in the world we make. It is up to us how we make ourselves, how we remake this world, and whether or not we choose to identify "the blessing/of water," our ancestors' memory and to honor the creators.

I am fond of all Harjo's works - printed or recorded; I was surprised, then, when this volume left me less satisfied than usual with her work. Her writings have moved from poetry to poetry and prose poems to this book subtitled poems and tales - some of the tales are more essay than tale. Looking specifically at the essays, I realized why I was less satisfied with this book: her work is more personal, more self revealing in a way which makes it less universal. But one of the real strengths in much of her writting is that she writes of the particular - her Native American cultural background - in a way that makes it ring as true experience, as universal truth.Once I recognized this shift and read A Map to the Next World with a mind set closer to how I would read confessional poetry, I began to appreciate some of the pieces I first considered weaker in a more favorable light - for example, the design of light and dark - an essay on snap judgment based on hue of skin. The piece Returning from the Enemy is a very strong autobiographical piece alternating prose and poetry - the former being individual and personal, the latter being more universal. The alternation of the two build upon each other as fact and truth ... an thus built a splendid foundation for understanding both the truth of Joy Harjo's life as well as truth of all our lives.Her poetry has strong and wonderful images - from Songs from the House of Death, Or How to Make It Through to the End of a Relationship comes "I run my tongue over the skeleton / jutting from my jaw. I taste / the grit of heartbreak".As usual, Joy Harjo is a master worth reading; this book simply requires a slight adjustment in effort of understanding.

Very powerful, very beautiful, very female ... wonderful poems & texts on a woman's relationship to her father, her people, her people's (Native American) relationship to power.One or two of these poems are some of the very best poetry that I have read.100% recommend