Riding the Earthboy 40 (Penguin Poets) by James Welch

Riding the Earthboy 40 (Penguin Poets) Reviews

• 
  Bill

  Riding the Earthboy 40 is Welch's only book of poems, published in 1971 before his distinguished career as a novelist launched with Winter in the Blood in 1974, but Sherman Alexie has called it "the most important book of poetry in all of Native American literature".
  
  Like Richard Hugo, his teacher at the University of Montana, Welch assembled his poems mostly from a dictionary of plain words like horses, wind, bones, knives, winter, snakes, moon, hawk, rain, and from a map of place names like Harlem, Moose Jaw, Dixon, Zortman, Heart Butte (see Hugo's book on writing poetry The Triggering Town), to which he added family names like Heavy Runner, Blackbird, Earthboy, Horseman, Lame Bull.
  
  This, from "The Man from Washington", caught me in its talons like a plummeting hawk:
  
  He promised
  that life would go on as usual,
  that treaties would be signed, and everyone -
  man, woman, and child - would be inoculated
  against a world in which we had no part,
  a world of money, promise and disease.
  
  And there's some dry humor here and there, like "Grandma's Man", who "never ever/got things quite right". We learn that:
  
  Well, and yes, he died well,
  but you should have seen how well his friends took it.
  
  But most of these poems are not nearly so accessible as this. The distance between Welch's life experience as part Blackfeet and part Gros Ventre and mine is already formidable, but his frequent use of surrealism and the personal nature of his vision ensured that the pleasures I took from his book were hard won.
• 
  marriah

  officially the best poetry collection i’ve ever read — so beautiful and so complex. i wish i could use language the way Welch does.
• 
  Jenny

  Poetry collections always feel a bit uneven to me, but some of the poems really stand out.
• 
  Chandra

  2.5/5 stars. This just didn’t happen to be my cup of poetry... but I’m sure it is exactly what others like. Hey, at least I read some poetry for Poetry Month!
• 
  Andrewhouston

  I don't really know that much about poetry. I like Dylan Thomas very much but don't pretend to understand much. I have a couple books by Seamus Heaney, William Carlos Williams, Yeats. This poetry book by James Welch was his first published book and only book of poetry. It's beautiful and easier to read and understand more than Thomas. I think it's the only book of poetry that I can read from front to back cover. The poems all feel interconnected and the book is almost like a novella or book of short stories the way a narrative seems to flow through the whole volume. James Welch's fiction novels "The Death of Jim Loney" and "Fools Crow" are also excellent and I plan to read more soon.
• 
  Mark Valentine

  I am moved by the audacious, simple, raw language in these poems. They have a cosmic balance that is as simple as a cloud bank, a farm row, and they are as sparse as a bum outside the tavern. The loss is palpable, whether on the reservation or in Harlem, Montana, and the language has a "quick coldness" while the creativity shows links to nature, cut and bleeding. Reading them straight through made it so that by the book's end, I felt.
• 
  Casey

  More people need to read this.
  
  The only reason I'm not marking this 5/5 is that some of the poems bent back too surreal, which is fine, but I struggled to keep my footing, and this reflects me as a reader far more than it reflects Welch as a poet. I'll revisit this collection again.
  
  Many of these poems address alienation, reservation life, the natural world, and a biter resignation of not belonging.
  
  These poems:
  * Directions to the Nomad
  * In My Lifetime
  * Harlem, Montana: Just Off the Reservation
  * Riding the Earthboy 40
  * Plea to Those Who Matter
  * D-Y Bar
  * There is a Right Way
  * Grandfather at the Rest Home
  
  (This is not a ranked order, merely sequential. See table of contents)
  
• 
  Christopher

  I love Welch's first novel, Winter in the Blood, and wanted to read his poetry, which at least in part influenced it. Undoubtedly, there are a number of remarkable poems in this collection, but for some reason I found myself disappointed by it as a whole. I think, perhaps, I had issues with accessibility and engagement. I couldn't quite grasp the point of poems that felt purposeful, and in others I was unmoved by the imagery or the language itself, at least in relation to how deeply moved I was by his prose.
• 
  Patricia N. McLaughlin

  Welch’s poetry has that deceptive quality of art carved down to its bare essentials, like petroglyphs: stark in the clarity of images, ineffable in the depiction of worlds beyond language—at once firmly rooted in the poet’s native soil of Montana and fixed in the constellations of Big Sky country.
  
  Favorite Poems:
  “Blue Like Death”
  “The World’s Only Corn Palace”
  “Harlem, Montana: Just Off the Reservation”
  “Riding the Earthboy 40”
  “Plea to Those Who Matter”
  “The Man from Washington”
  “The Only Bar in Dixon”
  “Thanksgiving at Snake Butte”
  “The Renegade Wants Words”
  “Snow Country Weavers”
  “There Is a Right Way”
  “Gravely”
  “Never Give a Bum an Even Break”
• 
  Brian Beatty

  The point of a book review is to put into words what a book means to you. Unfortunately, the poems in this book move me in ways I can't articulate. All I know is I succumb to the spell of their Native American lore every time I return to this collection, which is often. Welch went on to make his reputation as a novelist, but that in no way discounts this early poetry.
• 
  TK421

  I wish my words could convey some modicum of thought regarding the impact of this collection. To try to fully articulate any thought would be a great injustice to Welch's words. These poems are the type that one must read and reflect. And then repeat this process over and over again.
• 
  aubrey

  read for my Native literature class.
  
  okay, this one was way more what the fuck than I was expecting. still don't know how to read poetry or what "fish not fish but stars/that fell into their dreams" is supposed to mean but go off girlboss.
• 
  Christian

  Super uneven but when it’s good it’s magical. When it’s not it’s still good.
• 
  Molly

  2023 Sealey Challenge 20/31
• 
  Andy

  
  There are a small handful of books that I can't really get away from. This is one of them. I return to this book every couple of months to dig out a poem or five.
• 
  C

  Interesting collection of poems. "The Day the Children Took Over" is an excellent piece.
  
• 
  Aimee

  I flipped around in this one before reading Winter in the Blood, which I absolutely loved. I suggest reading both at the same time as they are related.