Anniversary Essay & Criticism

Anniversary Critical Overview

Harjo's poetry has been warmly received by both scholars and general readers alike. Most praise her ability to convey rich traditions of Native American culture and history—the horrible alongside the beautiful—in such honest, yet elegant, language. Her themes of nature, of interconnectedness, and of movement may not be considered original, but how she deals with them in poetic form is always admirable. In the introduction to Harjo's collection of interviews called The Spiral of Memory, fellow Native American poet Laura Coltelli writes that in Harjo's poetry

the sense of the perennial movement from one place
to the other . . . is not the senseless wandering of the
uprooted, but instead traces an itinerary that bears a
deep identification with the land, a geography of the
remembered earth.

In her brief biography of the poet simply titled Joy Harjo, Rhonda Pettit describes Harjo's frequent and well-done...
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