IN THE PRESENCE OF THE SUN : STORIES AND POEMS, 1961-1991 [signed]

Momaday, N. Scott, 1934-2024 [author/illustrator]

ISBN 10: 0312082223 / ISBN 13: 9780312082222

Published by St. Martin's Press, New York, 1992

About this Item

Octavo, xx, 143 pages. In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Spine is brown with red and black print. Dust jacket in mylar. Price unclipped: "$17.95". Boards quarter bound with black cloth to spine and black paper to boards. Illustrated: b&w drawings. Signed in ink by the author on the title page. NOTE: Shelved in Netdesk Column S. 1401215. FP New Rockville Stock.

Seller Inventory # 1401215

Bibliographic Details

• Title: IN THE PRESENCE OF THE SUN : STORIES AND POEMS, 1961-1991 [signed]
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press, New York
• Publication Date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312082223
• ISBN 13: 9780312082222
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First edition.
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature

About this title

Synopsis

A collection of stories, poems, and drawings reflect the career of one of America's most distinctive storytellers, whose literary oeuvre both celebrates and mourns the lost world of great native American legends and myths.

Reviews

Illustrated with 50 of the author's own drawings and paintings, the poems and stories collected here are all somehow engaged with Momaday's Native American heritage and the Plains culture of the past. An interesting aspect of his work is his attraction to forms, whether that of the folk tale, the rhyming couplet or the song. As he puts it, "And there was I, among ancient animals, / In the formality of the dance, / Remembering my face in the mirror of masks." Sometimes, it seems as if the powerful "medicine" of tradition can be retrieved through its symbols: "Mine is a beautiful shelf; / there is yellow pollen in it, / there is red earth in it." Elsewhere, however, Momaday's formality belongs to the tradition of English poetry, which can seem jarringly rhetorical ("How shall we adorn / Recognition with our speech?") or too tight to allow the medicine to enter ("What moves on this archaic force / Was wild and welling at the source"). This may account for the volume's unevenness. The poems with no formal allegiances best evoke harmony with the earth ("Rabbits rest in the foreground; / the sky is clenched upon them") and spiritual interconnection: "November is the flesh / And blood of the black bear, / Dusk its bone and marrow."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the Presence of the Sun presents 30 years of selected works by Momaday (b. 1934), the well-known Southwest Native American novelist. His unadorned poetry, which recounts fables and rituals of the Kiowa (Arizona-New Mexico) nation, conveys the deep sense of place of the Native American oral tradition. Here are dream-songs about animals (bear, bison, terrapin) and life away from urban alienation, an imagined re-creation based on Billy the Kid, prose poems about Plains Shields (and a fascinating discussion of their background), and new poems that utilize primary colors ("forms of the earth") to express instinctive continuities of a pre-Columbian vision: "What moves on this archaic force/Was wild and welling at the source." Like the Plains Shields he celebrates, these poems and stories are "meditations that make a round of life." Included is an autobiographical preface and 50 original paintings by the author. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/92.
- Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.