Songs, Blood Deep

By Gwen Nell Westerman
Holy Cow Press (2023)
82 pages

Review by Thomas Davis

At the heart of Gwen Nell Westerman’s new book of poetry, Songs, Blood Deep, is a message best expressed by her poem, “Strong People”:

Strong people walked here
Long before concrete and steel
Nourished by the earth
We are the seeds they planted
Fed by darkness and by light
Hopeful hands work soil
In drought and flood, frost and fire
Growing together
Sharing their harvest with love
Strong people are walking here

Westerman is a Dakota poet and artist who is also the poet laureate for the state of Minnesota and a distinguished faculty scholar at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where she teaches English, humanities, and creative writing.

In many ways, the poetry in this book explores the substance of Native ways of being. Radiant beings, relatives who have gone past the curtain of life, and the beauty of how a “Cardinal splashes red among/the gray branches” (from “Bdote on the Edge of Spring”) are woven through language that sometimes seems to be as much chant as poem.

But always the poetry comes back to the strength of the Dakota people. In the poem “Rising,” Westerman writes:

morning song rises
above frost covered earth
disperses in the sun

migratory paths
follow river winds
imprinted on land by time

cell memories carry
genetic experience
in heart blood bone

strength of the generations
tender as lilacs
returns in spring song

Human strength is rooted in a prairie landscape filled with lilacs, migratory birds, or fields where “dried leaves of cornstalks skitter/ down the road like ghosts/under the waning moonlight” (from “Harvest Phantoms”). Cell memories and ancestor genetics plant seeds of tribal people alive in the contemporary world.

Some poets like the Navajo Sherwin Bitsui create intense, juxtaposed images that sometimes clash, as he removes us from the sequential world we are all used to seeing and throws in a different sense of a universe of intensity that can be challenging to navigate. Others, like the former poet laureate of the United States, Joy Harjo, heal readers with a mix of storytelling, images, and personal reactions imbedded into images that can be historically harsh or contemporarily comforting but which stick in the memory long after the reader has finished the book.

Westerman is more of a weaver. Her poems shuttle together her sense of the Earth, especially the prairies of Minnesota, her Dakota ancestors, stories of relatives, the first ghost person she and her sister ever saw, and her grandmother, who would have been 100 years old if she had lived. Out of this weaving comes a powerful sense of how Native people’s resilience in relationship to the natural world has led to how they exist in today’s world.

Thomas Davis is a longtime tribal college educator and the author of Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings: The Tribal College and World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium Poems.