ABSTRACT
The title image of Roberta Hill Whiteman’s book, Star Quilt, is a perfect metaphor for her poetry. Within its carefully crafted form, each poem is richly evocative. Through synesthetic and impressionistic language in lines like these from “Winter Burn,” she fills her poetry with spiritual implications: “When birds break open the sky, a smell of snow/blossoms on the wind. You sleep, wrapped up/in blue dim light, like a distant leaf of sage” (Star Quilt, 31). When interviewed by Joseph Bruchac, Whiteman said: “I guess in some way…my writing has been, to try…to just look at life, to appreciate life, its mystery, how mysterious it is” (Bruchac 1987: 328). There is an attitude of acceptance in the Native Americans who live in Whiteman’s poems-no matter how they have conducted their lives, they have within them a sense of wonder at the magnificent experience of life they are part of.
