Peaches and Roses- Episodes in the Navajo Degradation

The poems contained in this group were written over a two-year period that began with a visit to Chinle and the Canyon de Chelly Navajo lands near the Four Corners in Arizona. Nowhere is the tragedy of Native Americans more vividly on display than in the story of the reduction of the Navajo from a proud, even warlike, and sophisticated agrarian society to the sad, dusty, poor community of today. The calamity that was visited on the Navajo under the force and direction of the United States government endures as a blight on our nation even as the Navajo today strive to make their society and culture things of lasting beauty and importance. These poems focus on the largely unknown but highly symbolic story (parallel in so many ways to the more modern cultural crimes associated with WW II in Asia and Europe) of the forced expulsion of the Navajo from their traditional lands and way of life. It is an old story in America, different from other stories mainly in the details. Tarltn sets the scenes in the book with Dialogues making the reader feel as if they are actually there.