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Title: The Cherokee Lottery: A Sequence of Poems by William Jay Smith ISBN: 1-880684-66-7 Publisher: Curbstone Press Pub. Date: May, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: REVIEW QUOTES
Comment: "THE CHEROKEE LOTTERY [is] a magnificent sequence that celebrates the Indians of the famous Trail of Tears....This is as fine in its way as similar poems by Robert Penn Warren, and it is an appropriate poem to have been written by a former Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress." --World Literature Today
"Smith accomplishes a remarkable poetry of fact and documentation..." --Publishers Weekly
"The richness of these poems makes the multi-layered task of memory a luxurious task." --Real Change
"William Jay Smith has been one of our best poets for more than sixty years, and THE CHEROKEE LOTTERY is his masterwork: taut, harrowing, eloquent, and profoundly memorable." --Harold Bloom

Rating: 1
Summary: Poor representation of Native point of view
Comment: Smith is not an Indian, although he claims to be. If you know anything about him, you'll know that he might be about 3 % or less Choctaw, but that has not even been documented. Yet he continues to make a huge deal out of it, as if it somehow makes him informed enough to write a book about Indians. The worst thing about this book is that is is told mostly from the white point of view. What is told from the Indian point of view (and there is precious little of that) suffers from Smith's fixation on the Noble Indian idea. Smith includes art from all these white artists who also had fixations on the Savage/Noble Indian...this is the kind of book that white readers will like, because it's not going to make them too uncomfortable. I suggest that Smith lose his white sources and read up on history written by those who were the most affected by the Removal: Native Americans. And get some humility: just because you might have a tiny bit of Indian blood does not make you qualified to write a book about the most humiliating chapter in American Indian history.

Rating: 5
Summary: A exceptional book of poetry ...
Comment: William Jay Smith was unknown to me as a poet or author before I picked this book up in a local library. "Cherokee Lottery" is an exceptional and refreshing book of poetry, a real pleasure to read. There is nothing tedious and overwrought here. The book begins with an invocation, and obviously the muse served the writer well. Each poem presents a chapter of historical fact and allows the reader to digest it without dipping into excessive negative pathos. The reader is brought to a new awareness of just what the plight of the southeastern Indians was. William Jay Smith has a great feel for language and how it sounds. In many ways I think this is the book of poetry I have been waiting to read for years. Now I want to read everything else he has written.