title: The Book of Medicines
author:  Linda Hogan 
description: Native American novelist and poet Hogan ( Seeing Through the Sun ) delivers poems of great verve. As in her other work, the poems anthologized here reflect both Hogan's Chickasaw heritage ("The grandmothers were my tribal gods") and a feminist sensibility ("I want the world to be kinder. / I am a woman. / I am afraid"), and many touch upon a concern for the earth ("This is the world without end / where forests have been cut away from their trees"). Through a history of the word red, the opening piece demonstrates the common bonds linking all humanity ("Red is this yielding land turned inside out by a country of hunters. . . . And red was the soldier / who crawled / through a ditch / of human blood in order to live"). Hogan's poetry is spare, elemental and direct, with a tremendous evocative force of imagery. She imbues simple things like crows, salt and bamboo with grace and dignity. A brief poem about a drought brings together Native oral tradition and modern reality, forming a prayer for rain. A piece about a chambered nautilus is a respectful bow to poetic tradition and the well-known work of Oliver Wendell Holmes. With this all too brief volume, Hogan has come into her own as an artist. <BR>Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  [Begin Reading](part0003.html#Chapter1)
  
  
  [Table of Contents](part0127.html)
  
  [Newsletters](part0126.html#backmatter25553)
  
  
  [Copyright Page](part0128.html#Copyright3)
  
  
  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading,
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  To the supremely talented Sally McDaniel-Smith, for your help on this book and
  for preserving my sanity for the past six years.
  
   _—D.E._
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter 1
  
  
  Let’s see what she has in her medicine cabinet. I mean