The Sky Watched

"The Sky Watched bears witness to Native experience. In Linda LeGarde Grover’s work, time runs backward through Ojibwe creation myths and explanation tales to find strength for the later years of boarding school and all the upheavals of the new world. Family plays a major role as does the roundness of moon, owl nest, gratitude, and the ‘grace of this merciful earth.’ There is heaven and hell in these heavenly poems." —Diane Glancy, author of Pushing the Bear

"This book of poems is much more than a collection of poetry: it is documentation of our existence as Ojibwe people, of our historical struggles and our strong resilience. Linda LeGarde Grover creates beauty, using words to form pictures and evoke emotion about our past and give vision to our future as a people. This collection is a testament to the fact that when our elders say, 'we are each given a song,' Grover was given, and gives to us, many songs. Read each word as a gift." —Marcie Rendon, author of the Cash Blackbear Mystery Series

"Just as moonlight is a reflection of the sun, The Sky Watched is a reflection Anishinaabe being and becoming. Reading these poems is a journey through times of birth, growth, challenge, and wisdom. Linda LeGarde Grover writes of words uncoiling, words that lead to laughter, words as ‘lifeblood linking ancestors and descendants,’ and the most important word ‘miigwech,’ which becomes a prayer through use and repetition. Gimiigwechiwigo, Linda, gaa-ozhibii’aman o’o mazina’igan ji-mikawaamiyaang ezhi-giizhigong gaagige waabamiyangid. This book is a gift given to remind us that the sky is always watching us." —Margaret O’Donnell Noodin, author of What the Chickadee Knows: Poems in Anishinaabemowin and English

"Linda LeGarde Grover’s The Sky Watched is a beautiful litany of poems about Anishinaabe lives. She weaves English and Anishinaabemowin in lovely and innovative ways, and what is left at the end of the collection is a heartbreaking symphony full of many voices, all coming together with their own sorrowing but merciful hands." —Erika Wurth, author of Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend

"This is the first bilingual poetry book in English/Ojibwe: not translations, but poems using both languages. Linda LeGarde Grover’s The Sky Watched is a poetic reaction, in a wonderfully realistic voice, of spirit and essence of the Ojibwe people. Read it and be transformed, as readers of Beowulf and El Cid and other national epics have been throughout the ages." —Geary Hobson, author of Plain of Jars

"Remember, remember, remember, Linda LeGarde Grover’s wonderful book demands. And she does. Again and again. Old tales from the Ojibwe tradition and new stories from mission schools and relocations where ‘a tangle of children smell home in their dreams.’ She captures the taste of recipes and the feel of beading bracelets alongside injustices minor as a navy bean and major as a lost language. These are poems as sad and essential as a field of cotton flowers. You will remember them." —Jeffrey Thompson, author of Birdwatching in Wartime and Fragile

"Linda LeGarde Grover tells of a calico flowered beanbag that when ‘split it spilled the past,’ just as her poems spill extraordinary perceptions infused with Ojibwe spirituality along with haunting insight of raw boarding school memories that house a continent of pain and despair. The Sky Watched is an intuitive voice of reverence that understands the power of the spirit." —Denise Lajimodiere, author of Stringing Rosaries

"Her formal innovation is to include poems written partly or completely in Ojibwe. In a collection about the systematic eradication of Indian language, this subtly tells a powerful story about resistance and survival." —Star Tribune

"The Sky Watched is a book of and for community. It is a book of witness. It testifies to survivance as, according to its last lines, ‘a continuing song / since long before the memory of mortals.’" —Kenyon Review