SOURCE: A review of Red Clay: Poems and Stories, in American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 103-4.

In the following excerpt, Womack examines Red Clay: Poems and Stories and describes the recurring images in Hogan's poetry, giving special attention to Hogan's use of the turtle.

Linda Hogan uses primordial images in her poems in Calling Myself Home: red clay, insects, turtles, light, water, organs. These images, like the dancing light of fireflies on a humid summer eveiling, flicker and flit in and out of the poetry and stories, appearing throughout the book. Hogan is concerned with the home one physically inhabits and the home one holds in the imagination, and home is shown to be a spiritual process of growing connection to place rather than a static location. As in Naranjo-Morse's work, the clay forms the poet: “These first poems were part of that return for me...