The Cherokee Lottery: A Sequence of Poems
Smith's sequence of moving, extraordinarily visual poems brings us to the heart of one of the nation's greatest tragedies and, many say, sins--the "removal" of the five civilized tribes, via the Trail of Tears, from their homelands in the eastern U.S. to the Oklahoma territory. Part Choctaw himself, Smith uses several different voices in the sequence, such as those of an old Choctaw on the trail, remembering the "buzzard man" who presided over funeral rites, while mourning the many who died without such appropriate ritual; the great Choctaw chief, Pushmataha, who traveled to Washington in a failed attempt to gain a hearing for his people; and artist Charles Banks Wilson, sketching the last of the purebloods in the melting pot of Oklahoma. Many of the poems appear in the book's signature stanza, a lopey, three-line, roughly pentametric form that sounds sometimes reportorial, sometimes Shakespearean, sometimes both at once. Moving, humane, unforgettable.Patricia MonaghanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved