Four Mountain Wolves (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Appearing in one of the first books that presented the work of the burgeoning Native American Renaissance, “Four Mountain Wolves” received almost no attention when it initially was published, and has, in fact, almost never been mentioned in any discussion of Silko’s work as a whole. Although her first published book, Laguna Woman, was a collection of poetry, Silko is best known as a prose writer. Her novel Ceremony and her two later books Storyteller and Almanac of the Dead are the cornerstones on which her considerable literary reputation rest. Criticism of those works often focuses on how Silko melds Euro-American literary traditions with traditional Native American and specifically Laguna forms.

But this is not to say that no critic has written about Silko’s poetry. William Clements remarks, in an overview of Silko’s career that appeared in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that “Silko’s poems reflect her roots in Laguna culture and the landscape of the Southwest. They also reiterate her theme of the adaptability and dynamism of Native American traditions.” Elsewhere, Clements also notes that “The brevity of the poems [of the Laguna Woman collection], the visual effects of short stanzas and indentations of individual words or short phrases that often trail across the page, and the avoidance of conventional stanza length, meter, and rhyme all suggest the influences of the modernist lyric poem expressed in free verse. Silko does, however, use repetition occasionally in combination with indentation and separation of words and phrases to create a chantlike drive and urgency in her poems.”

Silko herself perhaps provides the most telling explanation of her techniques and her location at the crossroads of cultures in the biographical note she provided for Voices from the Rainbow, the anthology in which “Four Mountain Wolves” appears. “My family are the Marmons at Old Laguna on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation where I grew up. We are mixed bloods — Laguna, Mexican, white — but the way we live is like Marmons, and if you are from Laguna Pueblo you will understand what I mean. All those languages, all those ways of living are combined, and we live somewhere on the fringes of all three. But I don’t apologize for this any more — not to whites, not to full bloods — our origin is unlike any other. My poetry, my storytelling rise out of this source.”