Secrets from the Center of the World: Volume 17

by Joy Harjo and Stephen Strom

Book Overview

"My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world." This is Navajo country, a land of mysterious and delicate beauty. "Stephen Strom's photographs lead you to that place," writes Joy Harjo. "The camera eye becomes a space you can move through into the powerful landscapes that he photographs. The horizon may shift and change all around you, but underneath it is the heart with which we move." Harjo's prose poems accompany these images,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816511136
• ISBN13: 9780816511136
• Release Date: July 1989
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 6.6"

Customer Reviews

Joy Harjo perfect words to Stephen Strom's photos

Joy Harjo is a multi-talented artist - poetry and music (with Poetic Justice) available. Here she has paired her words to Stephen Strom's photographs. His photographs of landscapes have an unusual and very effective use of colors ... many reminding me of the softness of watercolor or pastels.Joy Harjo has provided text - somewhere between prose and prose poems - that engage the accompanying photographs to create a mythic sense. For example a photo of rose-tinted desert sand with no sky (Overlook west of Tuba City)is accompanied by "Two sisters meet on horseback. They gossip: a cousin eloped with someone's husband, twins were born to his wife. One is headed toward Tsaile, and the other to Round Rock. Their horses are rose sand, with manes of ashy rock."An excellent book.

Living poetry, connecting all things

Nowhere have I read poetry that so completely encompasses the Native American view of the connectedness of all things. Harjo's writings, coupled with Steven Strom's photography of "Indian country" make this a book that I read over and over, each time drawing something new. It is one of the only books I've ever read that convinces me that language is "alive", as alive as we are, as alive as the shoulder bone of a mountian, as alive as a comet which streaks its way across the sky. It is my favorite book. Period.