The Crooked Beak of Love

Duane Niatum

This sixth volume of Niatum’s poetry expresses thirty years of endeavor.  He extends his range in this volume, especially in the section “Love Changes the Spirit and the Dance,” to offer testimony to the risks of the heart as well as the mind and body.  Cover art by Alfredo Arreguin.

“Duane Niatum has long been viewed as an important poetic voice, not only in the growing body of estimable work by American Indian writers, but in American poetry as a whole.  The Crooked Beak of Love, which blends masterful revisions of earlier writings with new lyrics of love, loss, and experience, is his finest and most mature work thus far.”—Joseph Bruchac

“Duane Niatum has surely attained an elder’s status in the patient mastery of his art—but the imagination that animates The Crooked Beak of Love is evergreen.  There is no one like him writing poetry in America today.”—Jarold Ramsey

When I can no longer see
the elders by firelight in the villages
still wrapped in a song blanket,
when son, daughter, mother and father
stop talking with the red cedar,
when the last woman quits beating
her guardian hummingbird to earth,
when a fisherman eats his greed
until his bones shatter before the eyes
of the disappearing sockeye salmon,
when the tribes stop believing their destroyers,
when the seal that gave my youth
a shield of dream circles tells
me no more stories of the sea,
and blue jay warns not even the ants
of the next storm, only then will
Crow end his fear of growing white.
             —“Crow’s Fear of Growing White”

5½ x 8½ inches • 70 pages • ISBN 0-931122-96-1 • $8.95