In Riding the Earthboy 40,… [James Welch] would give us something of the material and spiritual poverty of the American Indian reservation, or rather, and more significantly, of the no-man's-land of small towns at their fringes where the two cultures meet, usually unhappily…. Welch has lived this, and knows the territory, not only the degradation of this passage, but the other side as well, the attempts to resist assimilation, preserve the native culture and resurrect its significance in the face of colonial conditions. Recent popular treatments of the situation have, inevitably, reduced it to cliché, and so one hopes, reading this book, that the poetry will come to the rescue. But Welch's language is not equal to the task. As the two cultures mingle uneasily, so two kinds of diction mix in the poems, but seldom do they produce the chemistry needed to precipitate poetry. A soft, "elemental" diction...