The Cherokee Lottery: A Sequence of Poems - Softcover

Smith, William Jay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880684667 ISBN 13: 9781880684665

Publisher: Curbstone Books, 2000

Synopsis

For the first time in poetic form, The Cherokee Lottery treats one of the greatest tragedies in American history, the forced removal of the Southern Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. When gold was discovered on Cherokee land in northern Georgia in 1828, the U.S. Government passed the Removal Act, and 18,000 Cherokees, along with other southern tribes--Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks--were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma territory. Herded along under armed guard, they traveled in bitter cold weather and as many as a quarter died on what became known as "The Trail of Tears."

In powerful poetry of epic proportions, which Harold Bloom has called his best work, Smith paints a stark and vivid picture of this ordeal and its principal participants, among them Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, and Osceola, the Seminole chief.

About this title

About the Author

William Jay Smith (born 22 April 1918) is an American poet. He was appointed the nineteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1968 to 1970.

From Booklist

Smith's sequence of moving, extraordinarily visual poems brings us to the heart of one of the nation's greatest tragedies and, many say, sins--the "removal" of the five civilized tribes, via the Trail of Tears, from their homelands in the eastern U.S. to the Oklahoma territory. Part Choctaw himself, Smith uses several different voices in the sequence, such as those of an old Choctaw on the trail, remembering the "buzzard man" who presided over funeral rites, while mourning the many who died without such appropriate ritual; the great Choctaw chief, Pushmataha, who traveled to Washington in a failed attempt to gain a hearing for his people; and artist Charles Banks Wilson, sketching the last of the purebloods in the melting pot of Oklahoma. Many of the poems appear in the book's signature stanza, a lopey, three-line, roughly pentametric form that sounds sometimes reportorial, sometimes Shakespearean, sometimes both at once. Moving, humane, unforgettable. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Curbstone Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1880684667
• ISBN 13: 9781880684665
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72