SOURCE: "The Art and Importance of N. Scott Momaday," in The Southern Review, Lousiana State University, Vol. XIV, No. 1, January, 1978, pp. 30-45.

In the excerpt below, Dickinson-Brown offers a stylistic analysis of several poems in Angle of Geese.

It is surprising that Momaday has published so few poems. Angle of Geese contains only eighteen—the considered work of a great poet around the age of forty. But the poems are there, astonishing in their depth and range. "Simile," "Four Notions of Love and Marriage," "The Fear of Bo-talee," "The Story of a Weil-Made Shield," and "The Horse that Died of Shame" are variously free verse (the first two, which are slight and sentimental) or prose poems. They partake of the same discrete intensity that characterizes the storytelling in The Way to Rainy Mountain, and which makes them some of the few real prose poems in English.

The poems...