Review: Nickel Eclipse

Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon #

By Eric Gansworth

Michigan State University Press, 2000

Gansworth, Eric. Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon. American Indian Studies. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000. ISBN 9780870135644. Open-access edition ISBN 9781609178055.

Eric Gansworth is enrolled Onondaga and was raised at the Tuscarora Nation near Niagara Falls. He paints and he writes, and Nickel Eclipse is the book where he stops treating those as separate jobs. Published in 2000 (two years after his first novel) in Michigan State's American Indian Studies series, the book runs sixty-eight poem-and-painting units across the thirteen moons of the Haudenosaunee lunar year, from the Midwinter Moon to the Very Cold Moon; across those sections an eclipse moves over the face of the moon and back off it. The paintings borrow their vocabulary from Haudenosaunee raised beadwork and wampum (the Three Sisters, strawberries, green corn, shell beads accumulating into belts). In this review, I will argue that Nickel Eclipse is a formally consequential experiment in Haudenosaunee poetics, and that its method has simply outrun its readers; the book's architecture is surer than its critical uptake.

The calendar as an argument #

The organizing claim is structural rather than stated. Gansworth builds the book on a wampum logic, alternating elements whose meaning lives in the sequence rather than in any single unit, and then lets the eclipse carry a historical arc (prosperity, near-erasure, return). In my estimation this structure amounts to a thesis about Haudenosaunee time. It insists that the ceremonial year is not a quaint survival to be documented but a working structure that can still hold contemporary material: reservation roads, families, the Niagara border, the ordinary business of getting through a winter. The poems, by the press's own account and by the account of the reviewers who caught the book in 2000, concern people surviving inside a larger culture without ever quite belonging to it.

The ambition is right, and the calendar earns it in a way a table of contents cannot fake. A lunar year has thirteen slots and no argument about which comes first; a poet who accepts that container gives up the ability to arrange his best work at the front. Gansworth accepts it. The result reads as a cycle rather than a selection, which is rarer in a first poetry collection than it should be.

What the paintings are for #

The images are not illustration and not decoration. They are the second track of a two-track document, and they use a visual grammar (beadwork line, bead as unit) that carries its own history of encoding meaning. Penelope Kelsey's Reading the Wampum (Syracuse University Press, 2014) argues that Hodinöhsö:ni' visual code functions as an epistemology in contemporary art and writing, not as ornament attached to text. Following Kelsey, I read Nickel Eclipse less as a poet who happens to paint and more as a writer working in a form that a settler critical vocabulary was not built to assess. Gansworth does this again in A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function (2008) and From the Western Door to the Lower West Side (2009); Nickel Eclipse is where the method starts.

The honest problem, as I understand it, is that the method has outrun its readers. Twenty-five years of Gansworth criticism has gone overwhelmingly to the novels and, since 2020, to Apple (Skin to the Core). Graduate work on Gansworth routinely acknowledges that he is a master of the text-image book and then proceeds to analyze his fiction. None of this is the book's fault. But it does mean Nickel Eclipse still sits mostly unread as the formal experiment it is, and the book gives a reader very little apparatus to work with: no essay on method, no framing of the visual system, no invitation to the reader who does not already know what a raised-beadwork motif is doing. Gansworth clearly refuses to explain himself to an outside (etic) audience, and that refusal is a defensible position with real costs.

Where it strains #

Two weaknesses deserve naming. First, the paratext gives away the conceit. Publisher copy that tells you the beads alternate like wampum, and that the eclipse means thriving-to-near-extinction-to-return, does the interpretive work in advance; a structure that announces itself loses some of the pressure it might otherwise put on a reader. Second, a fixed thirteen-part architecture invites filling. Any cycle built on a calendar must produce material for every slot, and the discipline that makes the book cohere is the same discipline that flattens the weaker units into placeholders. This risk is the standard hazard of the sequence, and Nickel Eclipse does not entirely escape it.

A placement problem compounds the neglect. MSU Press's American Indian Studies list gave the book a scholarly home and, effectively, kept it out of the poetry-review economy. Contemporaries publishing with trade or dedicated poetry houses got read as poets; Gansworth got read, when he got read at all, as a case study.

Verdict #

In short, Nickel Eclipse is a serious book and a formally consequential one, and it is now freely available in open access, so no excuse remains for skipping it. Read it as a primary text in Haudenosaunee poetics rather than as a supplement to the novels. It belongs on syllabi in Native literature, in Haudenosaunee studies, and in any course that takes text-image work seriously (alongside Kelsey for the theory, and alongside Apple to show students what a career-long method looks like at both ends). Do not assign it to a class with no grounding in Haudenosaunee cosmology and expect the book to supply it; it will not, by design. Bring the context yourself and the book repays it.