Color of My Soul

It's a far cry from the island off the Norwegian coast, where Helen Barth Stromberg lived an artist's life for five years, to the High Plains and canyons of the western U. S. A. The move was the result of the poet meeting the love of her life - Crow, a Cherokee Indian - and the poems and prose pieces gathered here are the passionate expressions of the love felt for a man and respect for his special world: a world of spirit and flesh, man and beast, dance and ritual, song and legend, light and dark. The link may lie in one of Helen's forebears, who was from the Sami people of Northern Norway, whom we call Lapps. To them, the reindeer and transhumance; to the Native Americans, the bison and the buffalo hunt so graphically described in "Predator". But even in the harsh images of "Nature", the author finds room for love: Tell me you do not feel it, tell me your heart does not pound like a buffalo stampede, whenever I am near . . .