In the Presence of the Sun

A collection of stories, poems, and drawings reflect the career of one of America's most distinctive storytellers, whose literary oeuvre both celebrates and mourns the lost world of great native American legends and myths.

"In the Presence of the Sun presents 30 years of selected works by Momaday (b. 1934), the well-known Southwest Native American novelist. His unadorned poetry, which recounts fables and rituals of the Kiowa (Arizona-New Mexico) nation, conveys the deep sense of place of the Native American oral tradition. Here are dream-songs about animals (bear, bison, terrapin) and life away from urban alienation, an imagined re-creation based on Billy the Kid, prose poems about Plains Shields (and a fascinating discussion of their background), and new poems that utilize primary colors ("forms of the earth") to express instinctive continuities of a pre-Columbian vision: "What moves on this archaic force/Was wild and welling at the source." Like the Plains Shields he celebrates, these poems and stories are "meditations that make a round of life." Included is an autobiographical preface and 50 original paintings by the author." - Library Journal

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