Spirit Matters

"Spirit Matters is haunted by people whose voices are so indelible they speak from a world beyond this one--a powerful country where stories are spells that inhabit the living. Gordon Henry has created a compelling, uncanny book."--Louise Erdrich, Pulitzer Prize winner for The Night Watchman, a novel




A major new collection of dazzling, surrealistic, entirely original poems by an American Book Award-winning Ojibwe author, whose work appears in two new Joy Harjo-edited anthologies.

In parcels and particles, letters, images, repetitive themes, rhythms and sounds, "Spirit Matters" invites views into shadow spheres, of creative memory, reinvention of storied characters and place, as reminders of how poetry might turn longing, back to the very sound memory makes as we honor the imaginative lives of people and place. A collection of poetry, informed by irretrievable letters of loss, love, trauma, forged by musing on imagined relatives, living, dead, yet to be, shaped by spirit of places of we can never return to without understanding the living power of memory, story and song.






It was snowing on the monuments






My dead father's name next to my living mothers

You went further back into the cemetery

There where so many lies remain lost to winter

There with the named and the nameless

It was snowing on the monuments

All horizons packed with cloud cover

bodies





Some of us left in the vehicles

We came in

Some became some final gesture

Of departure's sun borne reflect


behind auto glass

heat blowing feeling back into a face

It was snowing on the monuments

Even in the warmth of an engine turning over

You must forget how we came to this place

How we leave

A procession of memory

an immersion in going away

music

Voices of older songs already

In the broken gone

As some wheel turns us back

Onto a gray road









--Gordon Henry