Quadrille: Christianity and the Early New England Indians by Diane Glancy

Diane Glancy begins Quadrille with the cries of primitive voices trying to understand the changes in their world after the arrival of the Colonists. Here she continues her exploration of the effect of Christianity on Eastern Native Americans that she began in The Reason for Crows. Glancy uses first-person narrative to bring characters’ interior thoughts to the surface, from early voices not yet identified as individuals, to the four Native men who helped John Eliot translate the Bible into the Algonquian language; from Tatamy, a Munsee-Delaware who translated for the missionary David Brainerd, to David Pendleton Oakerhater, a Cheyenne prisoner at Fort Marion who was later educated at St. Paul’s Church in New York and became an Episcopal priest. These poems are influenced by the Psalms of David. David is content to let his thoughts rise and fall like the tides in an interior sea. This is what it is like to run into the living God. This is what it is to be in over one’s head—to swim with thoughts heavy enough to drown.