Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin's Echo and the Anasazi by Reg Saner, Sue MacDougall, David Grant Noble

From the Publisher

For the better part of two decades, writer Reg Saner has been returning to the Southwest to explore and to reflect upon a landscape and the people who once called that landscape home; a people known as the Ancestral Puebloans, the Hisatsinom - the Anasazi. Here is a journey over miles of hiking trail under relentless sun, through chill nights on stark mesas; from campgrounds and kivas crowded with spiritual seekers, curious travelers, flute-playing scholars, and ersatz shamans alike, to desolate side canyons offering only the company of wind and sand, lizards and ravens. The desert Southwest and the ruins found there offer an invitation to a relationship enigmatic as it is irresistible. Poetry and philosophy reside in the most unlikely places: the petrified middens of ancient packrats; the haunting shadow of an Anasazi family's hotcakes scorched into the surface of a stone griddle at Keet Seel. And always it seems visitors leave this land with more questions than answers, impatient in their desire for understanding.

Publishers Weekly

When looking at the Anasazi's great accomplishments, your average ruin junkie will inevitably end up asking themselves questions like Why does this interest me so? and What can I learn from this? Saner, winner of the 1997 Wallace Stegner Award, offers his own eloquent meditations on these and many other essential questions of the American Southwest. It is a loving and vital examination: as Saner says in the preface, "[T]his book explores our living relationyours and mineto the most impressive prehistoric culture in North America." In a conversational style, Saner recounts his experiences among the canyons and ruins of the ancient Pueblo people in such a way as to make them universal adventures. This is not a selfish book, he is not recounting his conquests, but guiding readers on a reverent journey of discovery. As Saner is the author of four books of poetry (Essay on Air; Red Letters), the lyrical writing should come as no surprise; and if at times he over-romanticizes the Anasazi, it is a refreshing change from the dry archaeological texts and the "another ruin to conquer" attitude of many writers on the prehistoric Southwest. He relates our everyday city lives to those who knew only how to live off the land, and by comparing views of our relation to nature we may come to understand what Euro-Americans have lost in the rush to civilization. Possibly what we can best learn from the remains of Anasazi culture is, "that our greatest wisdom might be in living gently enough to make others wise." (Mar.)

Booknews

A collection of travelogue essays recording the author's reflections on the ruins of the Anasazi civilization and his personal spiritual reactions to them. Saner (English, U. of Colorado) seeks to convey a sense of nature and art that can be gained by communing with the pueblo structures and the surrounding desert landscape. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Kirkus Reviews

A journey into the homeland of the Pueblo peoples of the Southwestand into the center of the New Age. Saner, a poet (Climbing Into the Roots, 1976, etc.) and creative writing professor at the University of Colorado, has clearly spent much time in the Four Corners region. What he has learned there seems to be a kind of vague ecumenism, strongly stressing the religious superiority of prehistoric Native American traditions (religious traditions that are, in fact, largely unknown to us) and ancient ways in general, and a gnawing guilt for what, as he writes of a Hopi beggar, "my kind have inflicted on his kind." In vignettes and brief prose-poemlike essays, Saner explores these sentiments, constantly looking for "the other" in storied desert places like Sedona, Keet Seel, and Chaco Canyon. He scores some nice points here and there, as when he ponders specimens of the modern "idiot race"the defacers of monuments and stones, those who fill highway signs with bulletholes. But too much of this book is unsurprising; its meditations on coyote choruses, rafting trips, and wanderings among thousand-year-old ruins are the stuff of countless other books, many of them far better. It doesn't help that Saner uses as foils for his observations the kind of people you meet at tourist trapshippie wayfarers, bums, vendorsor that he seldom ventures into the difficult landscapes where, one presumes, true enlightenment occurs. Neither does it help that Saner is too given to little cotton-candy reveries. Celebrating the way in which Indian pottery seems powerfully maternal, he muses, "Maybe that's why any potsherd I've ever wondered at under Southwestern sun has filled my body with an echo of the stillness Imust've felt when yet inside my own mother." Such passages make one's teeth hurt. Only for readers who like their deserts with a soft edge.

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