LITMIR.BIZ

      And she takes a poet’s delight in the fact that the Navajo, who simplify many things, cannot reduce water to one name:

      Tsaile, Chinle,

      Water flowing in, flowing out.

      Still water caught in a pool,

      Caught in a gourd;

      Water upon the lips, in the throat,

      Falling upon long hair

      Loosened in ceremony;

      Fringes of rain sweeping darkly

      From the dark side of a cloud,

      Riding the air in sunlight,

      Issuing cold from a rock,

      Transparent as air, or darkened

      With earth, bloodstained, grief-heavy;

      In a country of no dew, snow

      Softly piled, or stinging

      In a bitter wind.

      The earth and sun were constant,

      But water,

      How could they name it with one word?

      In poetry Janet Lewis developed a singularity of voice over time, but in prose she was from the first strikingly confident. Here is the opening paragraph of The Invasion; we are on the Plains of Abraham in 1759:

      That September day the English appeared so suddenly that they seemed to have dropped from the sky; appeared, and fired. A warm rain fell now and again upon the troops, and the smoke from the rifles lay in long white streamers, dissipating slowly. The noise of the rifles, reflected from the running water and from the cliffs, was something like thunder, but the rain was too quiet. And running, for the French, had become almost more important than fighting. The head of Montcalm lay upon the breast of Ma-mongazid, the young Ojibway, the dark sorrowful face, with its war paint of vermilion and white, intent above the French face graying rapidly. Presently they took the Marquis to the hospital in St. Charles, where he died. Ma-mongazid with his warriors in thirty bark canoes returned to La Pointe Chegoimegon through the yellowing woods and the increasing storms of autumn. The rule of the French was over, the Province of Michilimackinac had become the Northwest Territory. The Ojibways called the English Saugaunosh, the Dropped-from-the-Clouds, and regretted the French.

      With similar confidence she brings us to Jutland in the early seventeenth century, as she opens the story of the parson of Vejlby, Sören Qvist:

      The inn lay in a hollow, the low hill, wooded with leafless beech trees, rising behind it in a gentle round just high enough to break the good draft from the inn chimneys, so that on this chill day the smoke rose a little and then fell downward. The air was clouded with dampness. It was late November, late in the afternoon, but no sunlight came from the west, and to the east the sky was walled with cloud where the cold fog thickened above the shores of Jutland. There was the smell of sea in the air even these few miles inland, but the foot traveler who had come upon sight of the inn had been so close to the sea for so many days now that he was unaware of the salty fragrance. . . .

      and to Gascony almost a century earlier, as she begins Martin Guerre:

      One morning in January, 1539, a wedding was celebrated in the village of Artigues. That night the two children who had been espoused to one another lay in bed in the house of the groom’s father. They were Bertrande de Rols, aged eleven years, and Martin Guerre, who was no older, both offspring of rich peasant families as ancient, as feudal and as proud as any of the great seignorial houses of Gascony. The room was cold. Outside the snow lay thinly over the stony ground, or, gathered into long shallow drifts at the corners of houses, left the earth bare. But higher, it extended upward in great sheets

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