ABSTRACT
Gerald Vizenor’s dazzling canon of published works includes a broad spectrum of genres. His first haiku collection, Two Wings the Butterfly, was published in 1962, followed in subsequent decades by groundbreaking novels, influential theory works, engagé journalistic texts, innovative forms of autobiography involving poems, essays, and prose-to mention just a sampling. His two recent book-length publications of February 2014, a poetry collection called Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku and a novel titled Blue Ravens: Historical Novel , appear at first glance to be disparate projects: a collection of delicate haiku with a learned introduction focusing on Japanese masters, and a historical novel with devastating scenes of World War I combat and protagonists who join the “Lost Generation.” The two works speak to each other in complex ways, however, starting with the totemic birds in the titles and the arresting cover graphics by Indigenous artist Rick Bartow. Vizenor’s personal journey as a post-World War II army recruit from his White Earth home territory to the west-indeed so far west that he ended up across the Pacific in the Far East of Japan-radically diverges from, yet also parallels his relatives’ earlier path from the reservation to the east, as soldiers across the Atlantic to the battlefields of World War I France. In Japan, Vizenor discovered the transience and timelessness of haiku poetry, and in France, the two protagonists, the Beaulieu brothers, become artists of word and color in the burgeoning Modernist movement.
