an american sunrise: book review

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv land. She draws from her knowledge of First Nation stories,Indigenous myths, and her spiritual connection to the lands of the southeast and southwest in her writing. She also incorporates feminism, and political and social issues. As well as an accomplished author, Harjo is a saxophonist, teacher and performer and is the director of ‘For Girls Becoming’, an art program that supports and advocates for Mvskoke girls and young women. She has accumulated several awards for her writing and became the first Native American to be named the United States Poet Laureate in 2019.

As a lover of history, I was disappointed (though not surprised) to discover how little I knew about the Native American cause and the hundreds of years of history surrounding its people. The poems in Joy Harjo’s collection ‘An American Sunrise’, shed light on the incalculable horrors faced by Native Americans. They specifically speak to the forced removal of the Mvskoke people from their native lands east of the Mississippi in the 19th Century, to what is now Oklahoma.

For someone who has recently become immersed in reading and writing poetry, this collection set the bar very high. The readability of Harjo’s poems makes them accessible, but this certainly does not lessen their impact and the importance of the themes she discusses. Evocative, yet beautiful, imagery is used throughout this collection. In poems like ‘Granddaughter’ where she writes: ‘I carried a sack of dreams from a starlit dwelling’ and in ‘Beyond’ she writes ‘wrapped in blankets woven/with sun and strands of scarlet time’. She weaves musicality and colour into her poems, gently alluding to her ancestry and spirituality. Fierce and thought-provoking poems like ‘An American Sunrise’ where the final lines: ‘Forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America.’, bring home the lasting inequality in her country.

I think AMNY (2019) sums it up very well in the article by Cory Oldweiler: ‘It is notable that Harjo – perhaps – remains hopeful about the nation’s future, as she didn’t title this collection ‘An American Sunset.’’