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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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.'' (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The Columbian quincentenary has brought a lot of new books by American Indian writers. Appropriately, one is by N. Scott Momaday, arguably the most eminent living American Indian writer. It displays primarily his sadly musical poems but also 50 of his drawings and paintings, some of which illustrate two se~quences--"The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid" and "In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of Shields"--respectively made up of verse and prose and of prose pieces only. The prose isn't conventional short fiction, but rather, in "Billy," bits of the Kid's biography and the poet's autobiography, and in "Presence," accounts of the significance of the imagery on Plains Indian warriors' battle shields. In both verse and prose, Momaday employs the deep image, in which things do not so much stand for feelings and beliefs as, however ambiguously, incarnate and exude them. His typical concerns are death--not mere death, but extinction, a subject he shares with other American Indian writers--and cosmic darkness. And despite these preoccupations, he is often witty, as in the handful of funerary rhymes in this book's concluding section of new poems. ~--Ray Olson