Crazy Horse in stillness

William Heyen's Crazy Horse in Stillness is a powerful collection of more than 400 poems that explores the collision of North America's two civilizations - one moving in a cyclical, visionary rhythm of primal timelessness; the other racing in a linear time-driven thrust to fulfill its "manifest destiny.". This collision transpires through the lives and mythic personas of General George Armstrong Custer and the Sioux warrior-mystic Crazy Horse, both of whom believed themselves messianic, embodying the visionary and the historical. Crazy Horse in Stillness weaves their childhoods, adult lives and deaths, and the places, incidences and people through which they stand in relief: Elizabeth Custer, Lone Bear, the Civil War, the Great Plains, the 7th Cavalry, the Lakota, the buffalo and the Battle of Little Bighorn. The poems ask the reader to follow the wandering North American tribes and the expansionist Westerners, and, ultimately, to find epiphany in the hills where the spirit of Crazy Horse remains free.