My Works
War in the Genes
War in the Genes is a fierce, sweeping collection that brings a deep awareness of Native American history and spirit to the difficult American present. Ralph Salisbury shies away from noting in his poems -- not anger nor indictment, not love nor praise.
"Ralph Salisbury is a strong and gentle Cherokee poet -- a hunter, warrior, and scholar, who fought well in the Good War and fights well now in the Resistance, with laughter and compassion, with toughness and grace, with truth and beauty."
Carter Revard
"War in the Genes and Other Poems is a poetic summons to historical metaphors of native company. Ralph Salisbury creats an original sense of environmental time,'words of love, to raise the dead.' The Cherokee arise with the breath of autumn in a singular collection of poems."
Gerald Vizenor
"Salisbury writes out of the passion, rage, and lyricism that mark the Native American spirit in these blasphemous times."
- Paula Gunn Allen
Rainbows of Stone
A collection of poems that interweaves family tales with personal and tribal history. Conjuring images that define his life - from the vanishing farming and hunting traditions with which he was raised to his experiences in World War II as a member of a bomber crew - he has produced a haunting, powerful work that expresses his devotion to the Cherokee religion and its harmony with the forces of Nature.
“By turns autobiographical and meditative, critical of hypocrisy and celebratory of spirit, Rainbows of Stone draws a bright arc across the last century.”
-Joseph Bruchac
The Last Rattlesnake Throw and Other Stories
Ralph Salisbury tells stories of violent conflict and the triumphant will to live, as experienced by Cherokees in contemporary America. The realities of war and its ongoing effects, racial injustice, crime, disharmony between the sexes, and a sense of rootlessness and alienation are balanced by a questing for love, a will to resist both inner and outer evil, and a determination to endure.
“...unique in tone and voice, unlike the voice of any other American Indian writer writing today.”
-Gordon Henry
Going to the Water
“Ralph Salisbury carries his learning easily. He blends immediate, everyday concerns with large, distant and overarching issues and influences. He roves into more kinds of topics than most poets do, and he enlivens them more; partly, ... because he is able to be ... a responsive human being - while at the same time carrying a sense of the mysteries behind everyday things.”
-William Stafford
Finalist, Oregon Book Award. “A magnificent summa from a superb artist.”
-Louis Owens
“The words of Going to the Water: Poems of a Cherokee Heritage ‘do it right’. They hit hard. And they must be heard. Listen.”
-Simon Ortiz
Ralph Salisbury, Professore Emerito dell'Università dell'Oregon, è autore di due libri di racconti e sette libri di poesia, di cui il più recente, "Rainbows of Stone" (University of Arizona Press), è stato scelto da Maxine Kumin come finalista all'Oregon Book Awards. gli altri titoli includono "A White Rainbow", "Poems of a Cherokee Heritage"; "Going to the Water"; "Spirit Beast Chant"; "Pointing at the Rainbow"; "Ghost Grapefruit and Other Poems"; and "Poesie Da Un Retaggio Cherokee"...