Copper Yearning

By Kimberly Blaeser
Holy Cow! Press (2019)
158 pages

Review by Thomas Davis

This is an amazing time for Native literature. Starting with the Pulitzer Prize for N. Scott Momaday and continuing through the work of Louise Erdrich, Luci Tapahonso, and the recent Poet Laureate of the United States, Joy Harjo, book after book projects powerful Native voices into the 21st century.

Now, Kimberly Blaeser, an Anishinabe poet who teaches in the graduate programs at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and who is also a former poet laureate for the State of Wisconsin, has written a new collection of poems titled, Copper Yearning. Already one of the world’s most important poets, Blaeser’s new book is destined to solidify an international reputation.

Copper Yearning is broken into seven sections titled, “geographies of Longing,” “Hunger for Balance,” “Frayed Histories,” “Alchemy Inherited,” “Black Ash and Resistance,” “Refractions of Spirit,” and “Envoi.” What these sections contain is an intensity of language, emotion, and historical resonance that ends up becoming an ecosystem of memory, meaning, American Indian culture and language, and meanings that encapsulate where all of us are at this moment in time upon Turtle Island.

One of the first poems, “Dreams of Water Bodies,” illustrates both the delight and depth of metaphor found throughout Copper Yearning:

Washashk, small whiskered swimmer, you, a fluid arrow crossing waterways with the simple determination of one who has dived purple deep into mythic quest.

This verse partially sums up what Blaeser has achieved in this book. A water rat crossing a waterway is symbolic of all creatures born from amniotic water that, by their very lives, have dived deep into mythic quest. The poem continues: …sometimes in our water dreams we pitiful land-dwellers in longing recall, and singing make spirits ready to follow…

Blaeser’s poems are personal, mined from her life. At other times, like in the prose poem, “Mochi, Prisoner of War,” she tells the story of a young woman in Black Kettle’s camp when Colonel John Chivington led the massacre at Sand Creek. Poetry is a gift that allows readers to see how small details from our consciousness and life relates to history and the universe’s constant unfolding inside time. It causes us to think or heal or act in ways good for both the Earth and us. With Copper Yearning, Blaeser achieves all of this and more.

Thomas Davis is a longtime tribal college administrator, a founder of the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium, and the author of several books of poetry.