Appearing in one of the first books that presented the work of the burgeoning Native American Renaissance, "Four Mountain Wolves" received almost no attention when it initially was published, and has, in fact, almost never been mentioned in any discussion of Silko's work as a whole. Although her first published book, Laguna Woman, was a collection of poetry, Silko is best known as a prose writer. Her novel Ceremony and her two later books Storyteller and Almanac of the Dead are the cornerstones on which her considerable literary reputation rest. Criticism of those works often focuses on how Silko melds Euro-American literary traditions with traditional Native American and specifically Laguna forms.

But this is not to say that no critic has written about Silko's poetry. William Clements remarks, in an overview of Silko's career that appeared in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that "Silko's poems reflect...