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Midland
Poems
Kwame Dawes
- English
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Midland
Poems
Kwame Dawes
Informazioni sul libro
The winning manuscript of the fourth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize is also the exciting American debut by a poet who has already established himself as an important international poetic voice. Midland, the seventh collection by Kwame Dawes, draws deeply on the poet's travels and experiences in Africa, the Caribbean, England, and the American South. Marked equally by a lushness of imagery, an urgency of tone, and a muscular rhythm, Midland, in the words of the final judge, Eavan Boland, is "a powerful testament of the complexity, pain, and enrichment of inheritance…It is a compelling meditation on what is given and taken away in the acts of generation and influence. Of a father's example and his oppression. There are different places throughout the book. They come willfully in and out of the poems: Jamaica. London. Africa. America. But all the places become one place in the central theme and undersong here: which is displacement…The achievement of this book is a beautifully crafted voice which follows the painful and vivid theme of homelessness in and out of the mysteries of loss and belonging."
Midland is the work of a keen and transcendent intellect, a collection of poems that speaks to the landscape from inside, from an emotional and experiential place of risk and commitment.
Domande frequenti
Informazioni
Home Town
the rough parcels of open acres, a solitary barn in the distance,
and the ubiquitous dwarfed bushes of tobacco.
I have grown accustomed to the flatness of the land, the clean
horizon, and the musty armpitting of our vulnerable bodies.
The sky is bare-faced and incapable of duplicity.
to your miseries—the things you never speak about,
not till now, anyway. There are dead bones in the soil,
you tell me, and these paths, scarring the fertile earth,
sometimes whisper the magic of sorcery at nightfall.
Already the urge to move on. We are failing
at love again, our bodies turned from each other,
and there is stern regret in your eyes when I look.
I feel as if I am being crowded by alien tongues:
what you say to this earth is not easily translated.
of two-day-old collards and a generation of sweat in its walls
we pull at the white flesh of battered fried fish. I carry my mood
landscape outside the window is perfectly balanced, the weight
of an old oak on the right tilting the bland sky upright again.
Parasite
I constantly pat my pocket to feel the comfort
of my utility accent, exotic as a slenteng threnody,
talisman of my alien self, to stand out visible against
the ghostly horde of native sons, their hands slicing the air
in spastic language. I too am disappearing in the mist—a dear price
for feasting on the dead with their thick scent of history.
with the equations that position the land,
the green of tobacco, the scent of magnolia,
the choke-hold, piss-yellow spread of kudzu, so heavy
it bends the chain link fence dividing 277;
the stench of wisteria crawling its pale purple
path through a dying swamp. I hear myself turning
heir to the generation that understood the smell
of burning flesh, the grammar of a stare, the flies
of the dead, undisturbed in an open field. My burden
is far easier, it’s true. I have not acquired a taste for chitlins
and grits, but I wear well the livery of ageless anger and quiet
resolve like the chameleon of suffering I am.
Libation
with rotten leaves so late in winter— Dogwoods, she says.
It’s the season of Christ’s bleeding, and those dogwoods were planted
as an epitaph to the old actor who howled his lines to empty houses—
before they bore him off on a stage flat, dead.
this ink used to scratch out poems of lost love on the smooth
white of North Carolina birch. Here in the South
at the bleak end of February I turn bewildered, I find comfort
in the simple affinities of skin, sin, and suffering. I sing tentatively,
knowing too well the warm scent of blood-washed Baptist hymns.
grow too quickly into sores, septic melons bursting
into startling rot—like overfed guppies.
I pray among the leaves, pouring libation to thaw the earth.
Tornado Child
Satta: En Route to Columbia, S.C.
where the sax used to rest
and the bass talking
to the Royal man who
can turn a rhyme into sacredness
where my enemies gawk
at the tumbling enjambments
ramming home a truth
concubine! like tracing
out the wicked’s path to hell
like I-Royal, mouth shooting fire?
says the prophet
cool like a knife edge
and then catch the cross
stick tacking a rhythm
satta a massa gana
landscape, the road smooth
the air heavy with rain
and my heart bluesing along
when the prophet speaks
and it is enough for the grooves
of a forty-five’s glimmering vinyl
the comfort of God again on me
that there’s a land far far away
Belle
Indice dei contenuti
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- Notes