Simon J. Ortiz stands out among major Native American writers such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, James Welch, Paula Gunn Allen, and Louise Erdrich in that, unlike these writers, he was not raised in a bi- or multicultural home with English as his first language. Rather, Ortiz grew up in a traditional Native American home--speaking, understanding, perceiving, and feeling in the Acoma language. As he says in Woven Stone (1992), "if there is anything that has sustained me through my years of writing it is that fact."

Ortiz is best known for his several books of poetry, chiefly on such Native American ideas as the importance of identification with a sacred place, the sense of the poet as the equivalent of the traditional storyteller, and the struggle for cultural survival. The theme of the journey recurs frequently in his verse, as the titles of his...