Poetry. In an expanded edition of the first book of poetry by an indigenous Hawaiian to be published in North America, Haunani-Kay Trask describes the wounded beauty and the fiery origins of her native land. Through Trask's eyes we see a Hawai'I of living contradictions. Strange unscented trees from Asia, ill-clothed people, and miles of wire coexist alongside new-born stone, little sparkling fish, and long spears of moonlight. [Trask] carries us on a path that begins with the violence of dispossession and stolen lives, and takes us through that plundered world into a present where the women gods rise up, strong and resilient, where life is defende 'with a spear of memory' -- Linda Hogan.
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Like the volcanoes on her beloved native islands, many of the poems in Trask's first collection spew fire. The writer, an ardent feminist and a leader in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, often tackles an immensely difficult poetic genre, the political poem. As the titles illustrate, many of these poems record the pain and displacement of a colonized people. As in most first collections, the poems are uneven. Trask succeeds best when she combines imagery ("green chatter-chatter of coconut leaves"), her deep feeling for the land, and bilingual phrases (in Hawaiian and English). Trask includes some detailed descriptive notes, a pronunciation key, and a six-page glossary, which help the reader to understand many of the references and also serve as a brief introduction to the centuries-old Hawaiian culture. These poems enable us to "hear all around us/seeping through the mud/a constant, inconsolable/ grief/long after moonrise." Recommended for large and Native American poetry collections.
Doris Lynch, Bloomington P.L., Ind.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
paper 0-934971-70-6 Light In The Crevice Never Seen ($24.95; paper $11.95; Nov.; 144 pp.; 0-934971-71-4; paper 0-934971-70-6) is the first volume of poetry ever published by an indigenous Hawaiian in the mainland US. For a debut collection, it is extraordinarily angry. An activist and an academic, Trask resents what she sees as the subjugation of Hawaii by the Japanese and the Americans, and she is deeply chagrined at the development of tourism, which she believes to have accelerated the decay of native island culture and language. While her view of Hawaiian history and politics will be of interest to outsiders unfamiliar with the islandsand while Eleanor Wilners concise introduction helps put many of these issues into sharp focus for the readerfew who are not already sympathizers will be moved by Trasks shrill, two-dimensional verse, which amounts to a kind of Polynesian agitprop. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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