Carolyn Forché's hold on her material [in Gathering the Tribes] is ingratiating if sometimes tenuous. One wants the ambitions of her poems to be realized even when they fail, just as one wants the author herself to emerge even when she refuses to appear. The tribes being gathered here are all local—that is, relative to the poet, whether by blood, as with her Slovak ancestry, or by spirit, as with her Indian "fathers." The locales of her poems, the territories, range from her native Michigan to her adopted New Mexico. The total theme involves the initiation rites of innocence—rituals of conversion to experience. A growth story, a kind of Bildungsroman of consciousness-raising. What is finally learned involves the two-way perception of the spiritual in the carnal, the carnal in the spiritual. Forché is safest in shorter forms…. In longer, more self-demanding forms, the poet is...