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Louise Erdrich’s words and imagination are large enough to freefall, swimming into the oceans of our minds, blend and awaken memories and hope for new life as well as qualify for three contemporary poetic categories – autobiographical, confessional, and multi-ethnic/women empowerment.   Anyone who has reviewed her, can’t discount her, let alone detract from her cluster of language meant to liberate an elementally powerful emotional response, says Peter Stitt in the Georgia Review. Language, a streamline of a volcanic narrative of her being both past and present, melts its tapestry into the complacency of the North Dakota frontier into a conjuring of mythic images meant to overtake situation and soul. In a review of Jacklight, her first poetic work, Stitt states that Erdrich “arrives at an understanding of the modern world discovering patterns within the experience she studies--mythic patterns derived from her own Native American background “  The poems are narrative in structure, benefiting from a strong sense of both her land, of place and character.
 The poem “Train,” expresses the sense of self which determines the speaker’s progress through the world.  Many authors say Louise Erdrich is presenting images of empowerment of woman but she is really translating life.  She is transforming in that perfect, written moment present tense, and becoming things she may not know she might become.  In “Before,” she says, “It happened to me first, the stain on the linen, the ceremonial seal which was Eve’s fault in the church of Assisi.  I prayed, I listen to my Brother Francis and I took his vow.”  In this poem, receiving her period was a loss of innocence and perhaps an oath of chastity.  In this autobiographical poem, she goes back to the time of St. Francis of Assisi to fully embody what receiving her menstrual cycle meant.  Both holy and stained, she continues, “The girdle of green silk, the gift from my father slithered from me like a vine so I was something else that grew from air and I was light, the skeins of my hair…..my mother divided with a comb of ivory were cut from my head and parceled to the nesting birds.”  This passage if filled with Christian symbols, a fortitude of meanings that is often integrated with Native American imagery.  Girdle of green silk could symbolize the earth and life, “slithered from me like a vine” is an image of Satan as a snake in the garden; hair parceled to birds could be the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as those near the Cross bartered for his garments.  In  “My Life as a Saint” the poem states: “I saw the house wrens gather, dark filaments from air then the cup was made fast to the body of the tree bound with silver excrescence of the spider…..  We have the least mercy on the one who created us. Who introduced us to the hunger.”  The house wrens gather is close to a biblical prophecy in Matthew 24:28 which says, “wherever there is a carcass, the vultures will gather.”  Also, the passage of the cup was made fast to the body of the tree is a symbolic sentence of communion.   In the New Testament, Jesus’ body is representative of the tree, the vine.  In a review of the poem “Bidwell Ghost” by Laura Kryhoski, Ms. Kryhoski states “In folklore, the tree is symbolic of the feminine nature.  Erdrich’s work relies heavily on the image of the psychic tree to create movement in the poem, movement set in motion by milestones in a woman’s experience during a reproductive lifetime.”  
Erdrich, like Terri Witek, draws up some connections with past figures.  In her book, Baptism of Desire, she gives an introduction to a poem by describing how Saint Clare left her parents in 1212 to go live at a Benedictine Convent.  I feel this is a historical person Erdrich could relate to, who gave up her mortal life for a higher spiritual sacrifice.  In King of Owls, she writes a poem based on a French King, who was bored with life so his inside court created cards to entertain him.
The male voices in Love Medicine, her novel, are very strong and legitimate. The book ends with a male voice.
“Yes. I don’t know why that is, but they just seem to be. You don’t choose this. It just comes and grabs and you have to follow it.”  In another interview I read she says her characters choose her, she doesn’t choose them.
In the poem “Whooping Cranes,” legend-time and modern times come together, when an abandoned boy turns into a whooping crane. There’s a sort of cross-fertilization of past and present in legend.
The cranes cross over the Turtle Mountains on their way down to Arkansas, Texas. We always used to hear how they’d see the cranes pass over. No more, though. I don’t know if they still fly that way or not. Another theme I see strongly in Jacklight, and in all of your writing, is the theme of strong women who become more than what they seem to be. Transformations take place--in some cases, mythic transformations.
That is true of women I have known. We are taught to present a demure face to the world and yet there is a kind of wild energy behind it in many women that is transformational energy, and not only transforming to them but to other people. When, in some of the poems, it takes the form of becoming an animal, that I feel is a symbolic transformation, the moment when a woman allows herself to act out of her own power. The one I’m thinking of is the bear poem.
I feel in some ways, even though Ercrich emerged about ten years after the end of the Confessionalist movement, she is a confessionalist because she takes her past and creates character and depictions of herself regenerating, through native and religious strength.
A shift away from an assumption that traditional forms, ideas, and history can provide meaning and continuity to human life has occurred in the contemporary literary imagination throughout many parts of the world, including the United States. Events since World War II have produced a sense of history as discontinuous: Each act, emotion, and moment is seen as unique. Style and form now seem provisional, makeshift, reflexive of the process of composition and the writer’s self-awareness. Familiar categories of expression are suspect; originality is becoming a new tradition.
In “Family Reunion” (1984), a drunken, abusive uncle returns from years in the city. As he suffers from a heart disease, the abused niece, who is the speaker, remembers how this uncle had killed a large turtle years before by stuffing it with a firecracker. The end of the poen links Uncle Ray with the turtle he has victimized:

Somehow we find our way back,
Uncle Ray sings an old song to the
body that pulls him toward home.
The gray fins that his hands have
become screw their bones in the
dashboard. His face has the odd,
calm patience of a child who has
always let bad wounds alone, or
a creature that has lived for a long
time underwater. And the angels
come lowering their slings
and litters.