Ew. Ew twice, for format and subject. The format is "Indian poem" - blank verse, not even as rhythmic as Hiawatha and just about as authentic. And the subject is a nasty brat whining because she has nightmares about the woman she killed because "she stole my man". Ew ew ew. And it ends up her children (and her husband) pay the price for what she did. I was kind of expecting there to be a woman whom Star Face was courting, and the story starting over again - but apparently not. Wow, I'm finding some truly nasty stories in Stratton-Porter's oeuvre... ( )

An intense, even exhausting, yet beautiful free-verse poem of love, jealousy, obsession, revenge, and guilt. It takes the form of a long narrative by Native maiden Yiada, who seeks a medicine-man's relief for the years of horror she has experienced since being thwarted in love by the innocent tribal-guest Couy-ouy. The latter keeps, and is symbolized by a the totemic Fire Bird. In the Twenty-first Century it is fashionable to be cynical about, or exploitative of, the experiences and emotions mentioned above, but even a skeptical reading of this poem overcomes that arch coolness, and carries the reader into a twin-world of overpowering natural beauty and inescapable spiritual misery. Almost every line contains an extraordinary visual image -- not surprising from this outstanding nature-writer. A comparatively minor deformity in the piece is its use of archaic "thee/thou" constructions, and the almost complusively inverted sentence-structure. The first arose, I suspect, out of a desire to place the action in a remote time-setting, while the last is simply a dubious artistic decision, and a particularly unnecessary one, considering the freedom of free verse. This poem deserves a much wider exposure, not terribly likely for a while, at any rate. To my knowledge, the only edition currently in print is limited to three-hundred copies, one of which I ws fortunate enough to buy from in 2010 at the Gene Stratton Porter Homestead park in Indiana. ( )