Subtitled: The Ascension of York

This book of poetry is a sequel to Walker's book Buffalo Dance. Both are poems focusing on the experience of York, the only black/slave member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. As such, this volume was doubly interesting to me because I'm a fan of the Corps of Discovery and had wondered in the past how it could be rendered in poetry. I have to say that in the end I valued it more as marginalia to the history and literature of that expedition than as a book of poetry.

Walker is to be commended on the broad approach he takes to giving voice to those who did not leave their own personal record of that expedition. He has been very sensitive to the Native American perspective and includes the voices of York's father and mother, York's slave wife and his Nez Perce wife, and Sacagawea. He also has poems from the perspectives of York's hunting shirt, hatchet, and knife. The variety of views and voices, as well as the narrative arc, gives the book forward momentum.

The poems at the beginning of the book make him seem a bit too bigger-than-life. It felt like overcompensating. However, this is partly to express his new-found self-esteem, to show how different life with the expedition and among the Indians was from being immersed in the system of slavery.

The second half of the book deals more with York's flaws as a person and the awful time he had upon returning to "civilization." Walker has done what he can to base his poems on historical fact. York asked for his freedom and Clark refused to grant it. Eventually, York disappeared from known records. Walker represents the conventional view, taken from an interview with Clark, that York remained in the east, in the later part of his life lived independently (presumably free), but was not successful and died of cholera. He does not pursue the notion that York returned to live with Indians.

I found the poetry rather dry and preferred the voices of Rose, York's mother, to the other voices in the book. From "Too Many Wives and None":

She was a lil' foolish fo' choosin' him,
but a good wife is what she was, too good
fo' his heavy hands an pigheaded ways.
After she gone, maybe he'll 'preciate
what he had. He did his share a knockin'
an' now he gettin' his on both ends.

My favorite poem is "Wordsmith," which is told by York but is about Drewyer, one of the Frenchmen that join the expedition and knows the sign language used between Indian nations.

He could make his body say buffalo or dear or bear.

His hands could be a great bald eagle or a hummingbird.
His arms and neck could call up a snake or a river.

Sometimes 'round the fire we ask him to sign us a story
just for the pleasure of seeing him make the words move.

I'll keep this book and keep an eye out for the first one. But only because the Corps of Discovery fascinates me, not because of the poetry. ( )