SOURCE: A review of Winter of the Salamander: The Keeper of Importance, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 3, Summer, 1981, pp. 515-16.

In the review below, Wilson praises Winter of the Salamander, stating that Young Bear's poetry "is best when he looks both inside himself and out at the world."

Ray Young Bear's first book [Winter of the Salamander] is impressive, his imagery precise. In "grandmother" the woman with "the purple scarf / and the plastic / shopping bag" is hardly the stereotypical Indian grandmother. At the same time she has a symbolic connection to the oldest part of the earth—"a voice / coming from / a rock."

While Young Bear's own people, the Mesquaki, have an ancestral bond with the earth, their present condition is fragmented, and despair permeates the poems. Young Bear's voice, alienated even from his own people, is poignant; in "morning-water train woman" the result of loving one's...