Hembemba: Rivers of the Forest , and: Cook Islands , and: From the Spider Bone Diaries: Poems and Songs (review)

Abstract

The ancestral voices of rivers petitioned for spiritual possession in Steven Edmund Winduo's second poetry collection, Hembemba: Rivers of the Forest, are not those of Langston Hughes,William ButlerYeats, or Muddy Waters. Although these modernist figures do flit in and out of Winduo's English-language poems as mentors, running through the well-wrought book is the quest to speak as Lomo'ha, a spirit voice and heroic quester in Nagum Bokien (his native language and culture). Many of the poems aresituatedin theriver-crossed region of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, where Winduo takes his pride of birth and starts his journey of Pacific crossing, estrangement, and [End Page 508] return. This book is the lyric record of this journey outward, disorientation, and return to the homeland.