Secrets from the Center of the World

Joy Harjo and Stephen Strom. The University of Arizona Press, 1989.

Harjo writes one-paragraph prose poems to accomodate Strom's photographs of Arizona lands in Navajo territory. The intriguing aspect is that Strom is also an astronomer - that's notable in the fact that his photographs, taken from great distances, that show broad sweeps in the landscape with stippled bushes dotting the hard earth, like stars against the backdrop sky - it almost seems as though he is recreating constellations in landscape photography.

Or you could see them as those pictures that were popular a few years ago - the ones that looked like nothing but waves of coloured dots and you had to squint at them for two hours and then finally - POW! Dolphins!!

As far as the text, I dunno. Usually I love prose-poems, but these seemed a little stilted, a little stiff. As though she were trying to force the imagery - as though she was intentionally trying to channel the iconography of the Native American mythology instead of simply being inspired by the land and the photography that, essentially, her words were meant to illuminate.

VG