Secrets from the Center of the World

Joy Harjo

This book could best be described as a collection of photographs coupled with journal entry-like poems. The photographer is Stephen Strom, not a professional photographer, but an astronomer, and the poet is Joy Harjo. Strom's photos are wonderful visions of the landscape on and around the Navajo reservation in New Mexico and near the Four Corners area (the borders of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah - an area described as the "true" American Southwest). All of the photos are in color and range from broad landscapes, to close ups of the trees at the entrance to Canyon de Chelly and dry snake-winding creek washes and arroyos. Strom's photos capture the colors and light which drew artist such as Georgia O'Keefe to the Southwest and stirred my own experiences of this place. I could smell the dirt, the alkaline, sage and taste the air and the coolness of being in the shade of sandstone river cut canyon. Joy Harjo's poems at times fully capture this, but her words, as she would wish them to, do not fully evoke the sensations of this place. They read like journal entries from someone who is of this land, but not always able to invoke it's majesty. This is one of Harjoy's earlier works (1989) and has the sensation of not being as much a part of her as some of her other poems. But, combined with the images, the book as a whole is worth the brief experience and enough to reawaken the call the desert sends to many of us.