The narrator in this latest collection of poems by Ray Young Bear is alter ego and spiritual seeker Edgar Bearchild, who balances the hapless polarities of life in the Black Eagle Child Settlement with wry humor, a powerful intelligence, and the occasional designer drug. Bearchild is forever infused with revelations both modern and ancient, forever influenced by tribal history, animism, supernaturalism, religion, and mythology.
Whether faced with tragedy or comedy, Bearchild lives in a world replete with signs and portents, from the Lazy-Boy recliner that visually accesses a faraway crime to the child's handprint that mysteriously appears on a frosty ladder. Edgar and his wife, Selene Buffalo Husband, and the other members of the Black Eagle Child Settlement create and recreate prophecies that “quietly wait and glow” in the “mythical darkness that would follow the stories.”
Poet, novelist, and performing artist Ray Young Bear is a tribal member of the Meskwaki Nation of central Iowa. He is the author of Winter of the Salamander, The Invisible Musician, Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives (Iowa, 1992), and Remnants of the First Earth.
A candid, poetic account of childhood and young manhood through the eyes of a Native American, this vivid narrative is destined to become a central moral text for our time. Through the persona of Edgar Bearchild—a member of the Black Eagle Child Settlement—Ray A. Young Bear takes readers on an unforgettable “journey of words” as he documents grief and anguish countered by an abundance of humor, pride, and insight.
Carrine Gafkjen was, as her daughter remembers, at once the most liberated and unliberated of women. If she had considered the subject at all she would have thought it a waste of time. She firmly believed in destiny; what fate planned for her she dealt with head-on.
In the early 1900s the twenty-five-year-old Gafkjen boarded a train from Minneapolis to claim a homestead for herself on the western North Dakota prairies. She lived alone in her claim shack, barred her door at night against the coyotes, existed on potatoes and salt, and walked five miles to the nearest creek to wash her clothes. A decade later she had, by her own ingenuity, doubled her landholdings and became a secure women of property. Then, at an age when most other women would have been declared spinsters, Carrine Gafkjen married Sever Berg and had six children.
Nothing to Do but Stay tells the story of this uncommon woman with warmth and good humor. It gives testimony to the lasting spirit of our pioneer heritage and, in these uncertain times, to the staying power of family and tradition. This book will appeal to all those with an interest in the settlement of the West, the history of the Great Plains, women's studies, and the perseverance of the early-twentieth-century farmers.
These finely wrought stories unfold in the Dakotas during the struggling pioneer days and bone-dry landscape of the thirties as well as the verdant years that followed, where the nighttime plains are bathed by softly radiant harvest moons shining down from dazzling northern skies. Young's absorbing narratives begin with the pleasant sense of “Once upon a time…” anticipation, but the firmly sketched details, warm humor, and vivid characterizations reveal an unanticipated and satisfying realism.
The haunting title story is about a beautiful and tragic pioneer woman and her wedding dress; her gown takes on a life of its own and turns into an enduring symbol for the grace and compassion of homesteading women on the plains. In “Bank Night,” a hired hand working during the midst of the Depression wins $250 at the movies, careening him into a single night of notoriety that becomes a legend in its time. “The Nights of Ragna Rundhaug” tells the tale of a woman who wants only to be left alone with her white dog, Vittehund, and her crocheting but instead is propelled into a life of midwifery “because there was no one else to do it.” The babies have predilection for arriving during blizzards and always at night, when she must be transported across the dark plains by frantic husbands who have fortified themselves with strong drink and headstrong horses.
All the stories in The Wedding Dress are linked by the enigmatic Nordic characters who people them and by the skill with which Young draws them. Emotions run so deep that they are seldom able to surface; when they do the interaction is extraordinarily luminous, both for the characters themselves and for the fortunate reader. The Wedding Dress is for all readers, young and old.
Growing up in a Norwegian American community imbued with the customs and foods of the Old Country, Carrie Young recalls how her mother and her neighbors skillfully blended Scandinavian with what they always called the American style of cooking. Young recounts how her mother, Carrine Gafkjen—after homesteading as a single woman in 1904—cooked for a large threshing crew during harvest season. Living and cooking around the clock in a cook car the size of a Pullman kitchen, she delighted the crew with her soda pancakes and her sour cream doughnuts, her fattigman (Poor Man's Cookies) and her fabulous North Dakota Lemon Meringue Pie.
During holidays lutefisk and lefse reigned supreme, but when the Glorified Rice fad swept the country in the thirties women broke new ground with inventive variations. And the short-lived but intensely experienced Three-Day Bun Era (when the buns became so ethereal they were in danger of floating off the plate) kept the Ladies Aid luncheons competitive. Whatever the times, in good years or bad, there was always the solace ofKaffe Tid, the forenoon and afternoon coffee time, when the table was set with smor og brod (butter and bread) and something sweet, like a Whipped Cream Cake or Devil's Food Cake with Rhubarb Sauce.
This book will appeal to those who feel nostalgia for a parent's or grandparent's cooking, to those who have a longing for the heartier fare of times past. The author's daughter, Felicia Young, who has "cooked Scandinavian since she was old enough to hold a lefse stick," has compiled and tested the seventy-two recipes accompanying this joyful memoir.
Despite the extensive critical attention that has been paid to the work of W. B. Yeats, we are still very much in the process of understanding both the greatness and the modernity of this poet. The assessment of his poetry has rested primarily on the scope, intensity, and memorability of his lyrics, but his romantic beginnings have made it problematic to acknowledge him as a modernist, while his failure to produce a long poem has for some time raised questions about his greatness. Don’t major poets, the argument runs, produce major poems?
In this meticulous analysis of The Tower, David Young addresses both these issues, showing that this powerful volume represents Yeats at his best and most modern, and that its careful construction makes it the deliberate equivalent to the long poems of tradition.
By tracing the careful ordering of the poems in The Tower, Young demonstrates the volume’s overall vision, giving careful readings of each poem and illustrating the growing repetition of images that create a whole which is both emotionally and dramatically greater than the sum of its parts. Young contends that the best way to read Yeat’s lyrics is through attention to the context he created for them. Their interdependence, he asserts, is the true key to their modernity.
This eminently readable study appears at a time when most readers are in danger of losing touch with the particular achievement of Yeat’s individual volumes as he conceived them. Most students and readers now encounter Yeats in anthologies, in a volume of selected poems, or in a somewhat misleadingly presented complete Poems. Young convinces us that by persisting in this approach we will lose sight of a significant aspect of a foremost modern poet and the very elements that make him a true modern.
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