The Salt Companion to Carter Revard is a groundbreaking collection of critical essays on the poetry and scholarship of one of Native America’s most loved and respected poets. Carter Revard, Osage poet, Rhodes scholar, and professor of medieval English literature, grew up among Osage and Ponca relations on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma. His complex, elegantly crafted poetry ranges from lyrical evocations of his rural childhood and traditional lifeways to reflections on academic life in Oxford and St. Louis, global politics, and postmodern science; from narrative poems about family bootleggers and AIM activists, tornados and rainbows, to adaptations of Anglo-Saxon riddle poems. In precise and gorgeous language, Revard weaves the varied songs of his multiple heritages and experiences into a symphony of celebration of the large and small miracles of the universe.


Revard’s blending of Western literary and Native oral traditions demand multilayered critical approaches. The thirteen critical essays gathered in this volume, written by leading scholars of Native American literature, explore Revard’s poetry from multiple perspectives, offering biographical and cultural contexts, thematic considerations, and close readings of individual poems. Two essays break exciting new ground by examining interrelationships between Revard’s medieval scholarship and American Indian storytelling traditions. Like Revard’s poems and scholarship, the essays are both erudite and warmly personal, filled with good stories that will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers alike.