"I did not initially connect to Mother Tongue. In fact, for over a year I rejected many of the poems contained within.  I thought the word choice was facile and the meter simple. 

 

Two years later, reading Mother Tongue again, I felt its resonance from deep in my core - a core which had been purified, tenderized, brought to a breathing surface through two years of communication with Umaa. I felt truth suffusing every 'simple' word. I realized then that every poem had its own analogous meaning, and that each poem had a function, each line corresponding with a subtle process, a release of trapped energy, a dawning awareness. What I had derided for being 'too simple' and not sufficiently 'poetic,' I came to see as eminently functional. The depth of my experience of the poem appeared to relate directly to the depth of my experience of Umaa."

 

 - Duncan, USA