In The Gourd Dancer N. Scott Momaday writes in the iambic tradition, in short-line free verse, and (of Indian lore or inventions) in paragraph-poetry. He is a good poet in all three modes. His best iambic lines are good examples of the "spiritual control" his mentor Yvor Winters admired in closely varied meter…. His best short-line free verse has comparable force, and it shares the primary theme—the radical unintelligibility of nature—as though one tried by sheer force of gaze to stare down nature, to will it to be comprehensible, then to record its unyielding.

His iambic and free-verse poems, good as they are, display too much their rigored tooling—and too much their sources: Yvor Winters, Wallace Stevens (as Winters interpreted him), Edgar Bowers. Nor is nature as incomprehensible as Momaday suggests. It permits us to live here, against what would be, were our existence an...