Overview
In this groundbreaking work of creative nonfiction, American Book Award winner Diane Glancy juxtaposes personal essays, Cherokee myths, and imaginative sketches to explore her experiences as a Native American mixed-blood coming to terms with the fragmentary nature of her life. The West Pole is a book about story-making; in it, Glancy explores the ways one structure of Native American story-telling reflects and shapes her own sense of identity. Through words, she creates and recreates herself, her world, the traditions of the Cherokee people from whom she is descended. Glancy herself has moved, circling back in her history, the history of the Cherokee people, and our history as a storied nation. Genealogy, school, Native American novels, Minnesota Public Radio, television, exercise bikes, Christmas gifts, autumn leaves, snow, a painting by Pissarro, a flight to Chicago, movies and photo albums: these are some of the occasions and objects that trigger Glancy's meditations, that become milestones on her journey.Synopsis
In this groundbreaking work of creative nonfiction, American Book Award winner Diane Glancy juxtaposes personal essays, Cherokee myths, and imaginative sketches to explore her experiences as a Native American mixed-blood coming to terms with the fragmentary nature of her life. The West Pole is a book about story-making; in it, Glancy explores the ways one structure of Native American story-telling reflects and shapes her own sense of identity. Through words, she creates and recreates herself, her world, the traditions of the Cherokee people from whom she is descended. Glancy herself has moved, circling back in her history, the history of the Cherokee people, and our history as a storied nation. Genealogy, school, Native American novels, Minnesota Public Radio, television, exercise bikes, Christmas gifts, autumn leaves, snow, a painting by Pissarro, a flight to Chicago, movies and photo albums: these are some of the occasions and objects that trigger Glancy's meditations, that become milestones on her journey.
Publishers Weekly
Glancy, the Cherokee author of the recent novel Pushing the Bear and the North American Indian Prose Award-winning essay collection, Claiming Breath, is a refreshing voice in these times of anger-filled Native American literature. Deftly blending Indian beliefs and mythology with European Christianity she forms a more unified view of America than is expressed in the "us vs. them" ideology of many Native writers. "I am only trying to walk in both worlds," she explains in one of her pieces. As fresh as this sentiment is, it doesn't make up for the unevenness of a collection that encompasses seemingly meaningless prose poems and genuinely clever short essays. The writing is similarly variable, with enjoyable well-written passages standing in jarring contrast to others that are unnecessarily obtuse. What unifies the book is the "West Pole," the metaphorical end-of-the-line that Glancy confronts whether writing about the controversial issue of who can rightfully call themselves "Native American" or comparing the film Thelma and Louise to Christopher Columbus's inexorable voyage. Ultimately, this volume reads more like a diary than an assemblage of pieces written for publication, and is at best only sporadically rewarding. Photos. (Mar.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Glancy, the Cherokee author of the recent novel Pushing the Bear and the North American Indian Prose Award-winning essay collection, Claiming Breath, is a refreshing voice in these times of anger-filled Native American literature. Deftly blending Indian beliefs and mythology with European Christianity she forms a more unified view of America than is expressed in the "us vs. them" ideology of many Native writers. "I am only trying to walk in both worlds," she explains in one of her pieces. As fresh as this sentiment is, it doesn't make up for the unevenness of a collection that encompasses seemingly meaningless prose poems and genuinely clever short essays. The writing is similarly variable, with enjoyable well-written passages standing in jarring contrast to others that are unnecessarily obtuse. What unifies the book is the "West Pole," the metaphorical end-of-the-line that Glancy confronts whether writing about the controversial issue of who can rightfully call themselves "Native American" or comparing the film Thelma and Louise to Christopher Columbus's inexorable voyage. Ultimately, this volume reads more like a diary than an assemblage of pieces written for publication, and is at best only sporadically rewarding. Photos. (Mar.)Library Journal
In this group of essays and autobiographical pieces, poet and novelist Glancy (e.g., Pushing the Bear, LJ 7/96) writes about things that are familiar to her. Some of the pieces here are short essays, and three were previously published book reviews. In journal-like style, she speaks about her life as a writer with a Native American and English/German background. She recounts several journeys by automobile across Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas and includes glimpses of her failed marriage and her struggle to become a professional woman in her own right. Glancy has a gift for language, but though she effectively explores painful subjects such as desolation and mixed heritages, she seems to stop writing before she has exhausted a subject. One wishes for longer and fuller essays, but this book can still be enjoyed by all readers.-Vicki Leslie Toy Smith, Univ. of Nevada, RenoKirkus Reviews
Slight, self-satisfied essays on issues of Native American culture and identity.Glancy is an accomplished novelist (Pushing the Bear, 1996, etc.) and essayist (she won an American Book Award for Claiming Breath). But she is less successful here as memoirist and critic. This grab bag of essays, many written in loose verse, deals at length with her struggle to define herself as an Indian. "I had no clear image of myself as a Native person," she writes. "I was a part-Cherokee living on land that had belonged to another tribe." But her account of this process of self-discovery, of trying to reconstruct the lives and thoughts of her forebears, is diffuse and in the end not especially interesting; the subject of "mixed blood" identity is treated much better in Patricia Hilden's 1995 memoir, When Nickels Were Indians (not reviewed), and without Glancy's grating, New Agestyle platitudes ("I guess you can hear anything again. You can still scrape hides. If only through the imagination in your own head" ). She thrives on circular arguments and questionable logic to assert her claims for Native identity, as when she defines a Native American as "pretty much like any human being who had a high culture built on codes of honor and a behavior and way of life that were in harmony with their existence"—in short, pretty much like we all believe ourselves to be. She is still less convincing when discussing issues of literary theory. She equates, for no discernibly compelling reason, the adventurous spirit of Christopher Columbus with that of Thelma and Louise of movie fame, and she maintains as inarguable that Native American literature can only be viewed in Native American terms (which she never defines), an idea the literary scholar Arnold Krupat handily dispensed with in a recent study.
"What Native American literature and culture offer you is yourself," Glancy volunteers. There are countless better avenues to that discovery than the one Glancy follows.