Elucidates the clear mark that Native American literature, culture, and oral-poetic traditions have left on five centuries of British and American literature. "This book serves as a usable addition to the growing list of studies in a flourishing area of contemporary literature." a . . . illuminating and reader-friendly . . . a "Norma C. Wilson's introduction to the present state of Native American poetry appears at an appropriate moment, when a new millennium and a substantial body of evidence suggest that some stock can be taken in our judgment of what might be called the older generation of Native American poets, those who were born in the 1930s and 1940s and achieved their critical reputations in the last quarter of the twentieth century. . . . She is to be congratulated for having written a book, which actually can be read. It probably will not appear particularly sophisticated to those academics who seem to regard literary discussion as a self-indulgent excuse for mutual incomprehensibility, but those readers who really want and deserve a convenient introduction to what makes Native American poets unique and yet situated within a larger poetic and cultural tradition will owe a debt of gratitude to Norma Wilson for providing it." Elucidates the clear mark that Native American literature, culture, and oral-poetic traditions have left on five centuries of British and American literature. Norma C. Wilson is professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. She is the co-editor of One-Room Country School: South Dakota Stories.