SOURCE: Review of Jacklight, in The Georgia Review, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4, Winter 1984, pp. 863-64.

In the following excerpt, Stitt examines the mythic patterns explored in Jacklight.

In Jacklight, her first book, Louise Erdrich arrives at an understanding of the modern world by discovering patterns within the experience she studies—mythic patterns derived from her own Native American background. The poems are narrative in structure, benefiting from a strong sense of both place and character. The poem "Train," for example, expresses the sense of self which determines the speaker's progress through the world:

     Tunnels that the body strikes open in air.
     Bridges that shiver across
     every water I come to.
     And always the light
     I was born with, driving everything before it.

The basic metaphor is technological, of course, and explained by the poem's title. But the underlying definition of self, the idea that calls up the metaphor in...