SOURCE: A review of The Book of Medicines, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 407-08.

In the following review, Berner commends Hogan's poetic talents in The Book of Medicines.

Linda Hogan, who is of mixed Chickasaw and European ancestry, is one of a handful of the most important poets of American Indian background among the many writing today. In her previous collections she has demonstrated an ability to relate Indian realities to the universality of what makes us human, and though some of the poems in Savings (1988; see World Literature Today 63:4, p. 723) may have seemed somewhat political, they avoided ideological pitfalls and their images were drawn from the most basic elements of the natural world. It is the latter concern which is most apparent in her preoccupation with nature's most primordial elements in The Book of Medicines.

Many of the poems are populated with animals, seen...