“CATCHING THE LIGHT” by Joy Harjo (Yale University Press, 128 pages, $18).
In one of the 50 vignettes that make up “Catching the Light,” Joy Harjo tells of receiving an image via Facebook Messenger from an old friend in Lukachukai, a mountainous area of the Navajo Nation in Arizona.
The friend describes the scene around him — mesa views and the sound of his sister’s old truck revving up for a morning’s work and the scent of piñon pines and strong coffee. Although the message comes via social media, Harjo recognizes it as “prayer language” — not a traditionally religious term here but rather one meaning “attention to the atmosphere of place and time” and to “how language is happening.”
“Language is a living being,” she writes. “It is feeding this image, giving it a place to live in my imagination.” Language is also born of place, connecting us to Ekvnvcakv, or Earth. “Consider that the Earth mind, architectures and aesthetics shape the mother root of our imagination here.”
Part of the “Why I Write” series at Yale University Press, a collection of short books about writing by single authors and based on Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Lectures, “Catching the Light” is rich with Harjo’s observations about language and place and imagination and the work they do in the world — observations gathered over the course of a lifetime as a poet, memoirist, musician and three-term U.S. poet laureate. (She also taught at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville for several years.)