The Cherokee Lottery
A Sequence of Poems
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Curbstone Press,U.S.
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For the first time in poetic form, The Cherokee Lottery treats one of the greatest tragedies in American history, the forced removal of the Southern Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. When gold was discovered on Cherokee land in northern Georgia in 1828, the U.S. Government passed the Removal Act, and 18,000 Cherokees, along with other southern tribes--Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks--were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma territory. Herded along under armed guard, they traveled in bitter cold weather and as many as a quarter died on what became known as "The Trail of Tears."
In powerful poetry of epic proportions, which Harold Bloom has called his best work, Smith paints a stark and vivid picture of this ordeal and its principal participants, among them Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, and Osceola, the Seminole chief.
"William Jay Smith has been one of our best poets for more than sixty years, and The Cherokee Lottery is his masterwork; taut, harrowing, eloquent, and profoundly memorable." --Harold Bloom|"[This] is a powerful collage of occasions having to do with the "removal" of the southern trives to the west, and each glimpse is made striking and poignant by the pen of William Jay Smith. The book tells much that I had not known, and tells it with compelling art." --Richard Wilbur|"[William Jay Smith's] exploration of a shameful episode in American history, in verse moved by irony and humor as well as by tragedy, is a major work by one of our most accomplished poets."--Daniel Hoffman
ISBN: 9781880684665
Dimensions: 229mm x 165mm x 15mm
Weight: 202g
72 pages