SOURCE: A review of Who Shall Be the Sun?: Poems Based on the Lore, Legends and Myths of Northwest Coast and Plateau Indians, in Western American Literature, Vol. 15, No. 1, May, 1980, pp. 37–40.

In the following essay, Ramsey commends Wagoner's reworking of Native-American myths in Who Shall Be the Sun?.

There is so much to admire in this book, that it may seem perverse to begin its praise by enumerating some of the things that might have gone wrong with it. But such enumeration can be itself a kind of praise: remember Yeats' observation about the pleasure in a sense of difficulty overcome. So here—another writer (it would not be hard to offer candidates) might have worked over western Indian materials at length, as David Wagoner has done, and produced a new version of Hiawatha for believers in noble savagery, or a now-generation trickster cycle in which all the...