50books_poc | Entries tagged with poetry

The Ink-Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan translated by Jane Hirshfield, with Mariko Aratani
I'm deeply unqualified to judge classical Japanese poetry, but this seems like a pretty decent translation. I happened to read this one because it's the one the library had, which did make me wonder rather about why these particular poems and why these two authors were put in one volume and that sort of thing, but the translation sounds good and I assume these are the major poems of these two authors, though again, there's almost no context provided except a brief biography of the two poets. I don't really know what other translations are out there and I wouldn't not recommend this one, except that I kept wanting context, though I suppose it's a sign of a good poet-style (as opposed to academic-style) translation that I didn't need it for the individual poems which are largely unfootnoted and don't need said footnotes to be understandable as poems.

Suki by Suniti Namjoshi
This is half a memoir of the author's late cat and half discussion of meditation and I have to say that I found the bits about the cat more interesting. It's slight and charming, but might be a bit twee if you find people talking to their cats and having the cats answer back in English to be twee. Her insights into meditation/the personal insights she derives from meditation do feel like genuine insights, and yet I feel like I know so little about Namjoshi/the narrator that I don't actually care very much about her meditations on the origins of her personality. Cute cat anecdotes though.

Intimate Apparel/Fabulation: Two Plays by Lynn Nottage
These are two plays that deal in different ways with African-American women and the ways in which men take advantage of their achievements. The first is about a early 20th century seamstress in New York who corresponds with a labourer in Panama and ends up marrying him, and the second is about a successful businesswoman whose life is falling down around her after her husband steals all her money and fucks off, and how she returns to her family of origin in her distress. I don't really know how to talk about them because I found them both (they are, in a sense, time-separated mirrors of each other and that's why they're published as a single volume) excellent and yet they're both awfully depressing. I don't know that I'd want to go to see either of them played, and yet they both struck me as powerful and portraying their subject in a very clean, important way.

China in Ten Words by Yu Hua, translated by Allan H. Barr
The blurb claims that this book explains China through the lens of ten culturally important words. It doesn't. But what it is is memoir-essays with single word titles, and those are excellent. Yu Hua lived through the Cultural Revolution and served as a barefoot dentist (his term) for a while before beginning to write novels. He does a fantastic job of showing the degree to which children can be both unknowing about and culpable in societal brutality: in his case, during the Revolution. He also writes about how China has changed since then. An interesting perspective.

opusculasedfera

Sri Owen's Indonesian Food by Sri Owen
This is the sort of cookbook that also functions as a memoir: most chapters begin with a sort of essay about some part of Owen's life. As is often the case, we get much more childhood than the years in which she became a well-known food writer and frequently consulted Public Expert, but that's my own quibble and there's nothing wrong with the essays themselves. It also functions as a decent introduction to Indonesian cuisine: there are sections explaining categories of food and which recipes are just one option among the many, many things that could be included in a dish. The instructions are clear and I desperately want to try several of her recipes.

Why Indigenous Literatures Matter by Daniel Heath Justice
I think the title here must have been decided at least partially by the publisher because the least good parts of this book are when Justice is trying to answer that question and you can just feel the underlying resentment that he even has to answer it pouring through his polite and reasonable logical explanations. Fortunately, the rest of the book is very, very good. It covers several themes and uses that he considers common to many literatures produced by Indigenous peoples (focusing primarily on the Indigenous peoples of North America, though not exclusively) and how different worldviews appear in these different texts, as well as discussing the importance of those worldviews and having a place to share them. The works Justice chose as examples are specifically (he has a whole discussion of his choices) selected from the lesser known portions of the canon, so it's also an excellent place to find more work to read.

Thick and Other Essays by Tressie McMillam Cottom
Cottom is a sociologist, and although these are more personal essays, her deep understanding of systemic problems and oppressions is very refreshing. She's the antithesis to that genre of personal essays where you sometimes wonder if the (often very young) author really understood how much they were leaving on the page, and then just as I was appreciating that about her, she had a whole essay about that precise problem of young, Black writers being taken advantage of and expected to perform their most personal feelings for an unsympathetic audience. I adored every word.

Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry by Essex Hemphill
Beautifully vivid poetry and prose about the experience of being a gay, Black man in the late 80s/early 90s. He's angry about AIDS, but he's angry about all the things threatening his communities and he's furious that anyone thinks they can pick one battle when they're beleaguered on all fronts. Not that everything is fury: Hemphill has a great deal to say about the joys of being both gay and Black, all described with that same facility for the perfect image.

opusculasedfera

Dates by Nawal Nasrallah
This is a short book about the date palm, covering both the biological side of what exactly it is and the cultural side of why it's so very, very important in the Middle East. Slight, but not without interest: one of the things that really made me understand how foundational to many cultures the date palm is was the poetry that's quoted throughout. It's not just that many cultures wrote poetry that refers to the date palm, it's that it becomes clear that there's so much date palm vocabulary that is normal and poetic in Arabic and in English has to be translated with scientific terminology that looks wildly out of place in this type of e.g. love poetry. A good resource on date palms, but you have to really want to read about dates.

Joon: Persian Cooking Made Simple by Najmieh Batmanglij
A perfectly good Persian cookbook featuring a good variety of types of dishes, all selected with the intent of being cookable by the average non-Persian cook in North America without sacrificing taste. I will probably make some of these dishes, though as a readable cookbook, I preferred her Food of Life (reviewed here) which not only lists recipes, but then elaborates on several different possible variants for each one and gives a much bigger picture of the scope of the cuisine.

Passage by Gwen Benaway
I should have read this before I read Benaway's second book of poetry (reviewed here) because she has definitely grown since this book, but the poems are still excellent and heart-rending.

Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour
Khakpour has Lyme disease, which is both hugely debilitating and sufficiently vague that she has a hard time getting doctors to believe her. She's not sure when she contracted the disease, only that she seems to have always been sick, and the memoir is about both her life as someone coping with a debilitating and mysterious condition and the process of finding adequate medical care for something that some doctors don't even believe in. Khakpour is very honest about the ways in which she is and is not coping well with her disease; even a diagnosis is not necessarily the consolation you might expect it would be, and her resentment at having to have her life restricted is very refreshing.

Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation by Imani Perry
I'm not even sure how to review this except to say that if you're interested in race or history or gender, you should read this book. Perry describes how the liberal project (in the European sense of liberal, not just meaning vaguely leftist) keeps changing, but always maintains categories of non-persons that do not count in the new liberal order, but actually hold it up. She takes the reader through various historical examples to illuminate her argument, alway allowing for the complexity of the many different ways her subjects were oppressed, though I think she does an excellent job of tying them all back to the same strands of Western thought. Again, I am describing this complicated book very badly, but it doesn't feel complicated to read, only very deeply considered, and I recommend it highly.

even this page is white by Vivek Shraya
I have a terrible bias against the sort of poetry chapbook where poetry is confined to one tiny corner of the page, even when this means that a short poem must be split up over three pages for no particular reason and there are acres of blank white space. I suppose it might be a deliberate point in a collection about race and whiteness, but it wasn't to my taste. The poems themselves are somewhat uneven, though I may just be the wrong audience. When they were good, they were quite good; when they were otherwise, they were banal or plodding. On the other hand, I may be missing something: I'm not much of a poetry reader, and I don't have the POC or immigrant experiences that Shraya is exploring here. It did win some awards in Canada. I'd love to hear someone else's thoughts if anyone else here has read it, and I am looking forward to reading Shraya's recent book of essays.

opusculasedfera

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature by Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley
An academic survey of a wide variety of types of texts that discuss FF eroticism/love in the Caribbean. Her argument is that a queer/wlw culture has always existed in the various Caribbean islands and that there is a local language in which one can talk about it, refuting claims that queerness is something imposed by Europeans or North Americans onto Caribbean people. I personally found the anthropological work done on actual communities of queer women more compelling than some of the literary analysis (and I like literary analysis!), but Tinsley does a great job of demonstrating how it all fits together. (Also her usage and analysis of terminology for these groups of women is way more detailed and thoughtful than I'm achieving in this capsule review, but I'm using queer to get the general point across.)

Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism by Umair Muhammad
A short book discussing how we need systemic change to solve the big problems of our time rather than individual action (e.g. switching out our power plants as a whole rather than everyone using slightly less energy individually). Not terribly original, but not a bad overview, and it might be useful as a book to give people who were just edging into the topic for the first time, though you'd probably want them to be at least somewhat receptive to leftist ideas. A bit marred by an afterword to this second edition that mostly consists of complaining about bell hooks' lack of relevance to third world women, which is a bit rich from a guy who talks about Marx all the time and doesn't mention gender at all in his own analysis, but the author is quite young and I hope he will grow out of it.

Holy Wild by Gwen Benaway
A collection of poetry, mostly about the author's experiences as a First Nations trans woman in Canada (specifically she's Anishinaabe and Metis). I highly recommend it and I'm looking forward to her collection of essays that is to be published later this year, but definitely trigger warnings for sexual and colonial violence throughout.

Transgender China ed. Howard Chiang*
A collection of academic papers that each cover some aspect of cross-gender activity in Chinese history. The topics range from oral history conducted among trans people in modern Hong Kong, to analyses of classic literature with gender-bending characters, to a paper that argues quite convincingly that eunuchs in China have always been socially considered men rather than a third sex or a genderbent alternate sex as they are sometimes represented in Western historiography. Interesting stuff, though definitely aimed at specialists more than the general audience.

*My interpretation of the rules here is that this collection, which is edited by a Taiwanese man and features many Chinese authors, is eligible for the challenge. However, some of the authors included are white, so I'm willing to defer to the group if there's disagreement on this question.

tags: non-fiction, poetry, china, south asia, anishinaabe, metis, caribbean

kay_mulan

Taming the Tiger Within: Meditations on Transforming Difficult Emotions by Thich Nhat Hanh, review.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Nh%E1%BA%A5t_H%E1%BA%A1nh: for more info on the author.

I really liked reading this briskly, for the most part.

I really, in earnest, am not making fun of the author, or his Buddhism; I have enjoyed his poetry one poem at a time for many a year.

Might it be that his fear of women might reflect the greater misogyny that might be spoken of in Asian culture?

I really appreciate the Buddhist energy of this book, which really felt like I read, and properly absorbed, good thought by... soberness, and reflection, in as if five minutes.

I would recommend this book.

kay_mulan

In Our Own Words
Filipino Writers in Vernacular Languages
Edited by Isagani R. Cruz
Review here
https://kay-mulan.dreamwidth.org/730972.html
Excerpt and Translation here
https://kay-mulan.dreamwidth.org/731301.html

Current Music: it's hard to look right

yatima

I read this on the recommendation of the great Roxane Gay. Like everything she recommends, it's excellent.

grant me a few free hours each day. Grant me a Moleskine pad & a ballpoint pen with some mass. Grant me your gift of this voice. Pages & pages of this voice, in a good book from a loving press. & grant me a great love, too. Grant a way to provide for my love. Like, a tenure-track job at a small college in the Midwest.

Wicker draws the reader in with this likable, conversational-confessional frankness. His project isn't to emphasize our shared experience, though. It's to draw attention to the cracks.

The danger in consuming the Grey Poupon is believing that you, too, can be a first-generation member of the elite, turning your nose up at soul music, simple joy, fried foods, casual Fridays—essentially everything I’m made of.

Under late capitalism, we are all subject to precarity, but no one more so than a black man in a police state. Wicker challenges us not to look away.

What’s the use in playing it like everything’s going to be OK for me in the event of mortal catastrophe

Grant this guy tenure, and bulletproof skin.

glinda

I started doing this challenge at the start of the year and I'm delighted to see that this comm has woken up again. I don't generally make it to 50 books in any given year, so I don't expect to finish the challenge this year. My target for this year is to make it to 25 books read for the challenge. I'm currently on my 11th book so hopefully the comm having woken up will inspire me to get reading! (Just writing this post caused me to grab another book of poetry from my shelf and read it so I could include it here.)

I've read a few books of poetry for the challenge (largely because I also set myself the challenge to read 10 books of poetry this year, I've got to 7 so far) so I thought that would make for a good theme to gather together some mini-reviews.

( 2. Off-Colour - Jackie Kay )
( 3. Talking Turkeys - Benjamin Zephaniah )
( 7. Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known - Wole Soyinka )
( 10.A Silence You Can Carry - Hibaq Osman )

yatima

Believe the hype. This is the best book of poetry I have read in years, dense with precisely described emotion. It reminded me of the first time I read Plath's Ariel:

Not
a piano—but a mare
draped in a black sheet. White mouth
sticking out like a fist. I kneel
at my beast. The sheet sunken
at her ribs.

A side-note: in my Honours English class back in nineteen ninety-mumble, our great professor Bruce Gardiner wasted most of a tutorial trying to get me and the rest of my virginal cohort to understand Yeats "The Song of the Wandering Aengus" as the poet going outside at night for a wank. One of Vuong's poems here is helpfully titled "Ode to Masturbation," which should save many graduate student hours.

yatima

"Welcome to the Middle-Aged Orphans Club," writes Sherman Alexie, and as a middle-aged orphan myself, I did feel welcome, and seen, and understood. In July, Alexie cancelled part of his book tour because of complicated grief and being haunted by his late mother: "I don’t believe in ghosts," he writes. "But I see them all the time." Me too, brother.

Like Bad Indians, this is an intricate quilt of a book, part memoir, part poem, part dream. It's hard to imagine how it could be otherwise. The loss of a parent is a loss of meaning. For indigenous people, this is doubly true. Lillian Alexie was one of the last fluent speakers of Salish. Her death robs her son, and the world, of an entire universe.

This book, like Hawking radiation, is an almost-undetectable glow of meaning escaping from a black hole. If you haven't lost a parent yet it might be too much to bear, but if you have, it might feel like joining a group of survivors around a campfire after a catastrophe.

IN AUGUST 2015, as a huge forest fire burned on my reservation, as it burned within feet of the abandoned uranium mine, the United States government sent a representative to conduct a town hall to address the growing concerns and fears. My sister texted me the play-by-play of the meeting. “OMG!” she texted. “The government guy just said the USA doesn’t believe the forest fire presents a serious danger to the Spokane Indian community, even if the fire burns right through the uranium mine.”

...“Is the air okay?” I texted. “It hurts a little to breathe,” my sister texted back. “But we’re okay.” Jesus, I thought, is there a better and more succinct definition of grief than It hurts a little to breathe, but we’re okay?

dorothean

One of the people Barbara Neely thanks at the beginning of Blanche Among the Talented Tenth is hattie gossett, which reminded me that I hadn't read presenting... sister no blues for a while.

I love this collection of poems so much that I get kind of incoherent trying to explain myself, so this is the best I could do for a Goodreads review.

But I thought for this community I would do something different.

gossett introduces each of the four sections of this book with some song lyrics, most of which I wasn't familiar with. I have been able to find youtube videos for most of them and so here's the sister noblues playlist! I've added the song title and link but the section titles and lyrics are as they appear in the book. I think I'll be buying some of these albums next...

SECTION #1 - JUST A HIT OR 2/SKETCHES & POLAROIDS FROM EVERYDAY

won't you stop and take a little time out with me?
just take 5.
just take 5.
stop your busy day and take the time out to see.

- carmen mcrae, take five

I'm a travellin woman
I got a travelling mind.
I'm gonna buy me a ticket
an ease on down the line.

- clara smith, freight train blues (this video of somebody's victrola is all I could find. hattie gossett credits a 1980 album called women's railroad blues)

they say to keep on smilin
when trouble comes in twos
rich folks say to keep on smilin
but poor folks pay the dues

- abbey lincoln/aminata mosaka, in the red. not on youtube now; from her 1961 album straight ahead

--------------
SECTION #2 - UNCLE SAM THE SONG & DANCEMAN/YO DADDY

mr. backlash, mr. backlash
who do you think I am?
raise my taxes
freeze my wages
and send my son to Vietnam.

- nina simone, backlash blues

the blues are created by the men folk
especially on friday when the eagle flies
and they don't want to give up the money to pay them folks
for them televisions and stereos and thangs
when they git it on friday they want to put it in their pockets and walk around with it.
makes em feel important.
and you know if you ask em about it they may talke to you real real bad.
lock you in the basement for a week for even reminding him he's got bills.
but I got a little song that I always sing cuz it keeps it in my thinking that one money don't stop no show.
he may it slow it down for a minute for a minute
but never ever stop it.
cuz you see
the show must go on.

- esther phillips, I'm gettin' 'long alright. not on youtube now; from her 1970 live album burnin'

you're in trouble
can't you see?
baby you ain't fooling me
with your smooth talk.

- evelyn champagne king, smooth talk

--------------
SECTION #3 - SOUL LOOKS BACK IN WONDER/PRESENTING...SISTER NOBLUES

how I made it over
coming on over
all these years.
you know my soul looks back in wonder:
how did I make it over?

- mahalia jackson, how I got over

you never git nothing by bein an angel child.
you better change yo ways and get real wild.
I'm gonna tell you something, wouldn't tell you no lie.
wild women are the only kind that ever git by.
wild women don't have to worry, they don't have no blues.

- ida cox, wild women don't have the blues (to 1:27)

I got a lot
a lot of what I got
and what I got is
all mine.

- ethel sweet mama stringbean waters, come up and see me sometime

no more pleadin.
no more cryin.
cuz I believe that I do hold up half the sky.

- linda tillery, freedom time

in a special kind of womanly way.

- linda tillery, womanly way. not on youtube now; from her 1977 self-titled album

--------------
SECTION #4 - SOME FINAL HITS/COMIN THROUGH THE CRACKS

just pick up your paper
turn on your tv.

- roberta flack, trying times. not on youtube now; from her 1969 album first take

there's no savior
in the struggle
for freedom time.

- linda tillery, freedom time again

I know we can make it.
I know we can work it out.
if we wanna
yes we can can.

- the pointer sisters, yes we can

pharaoh's army
all of them men got drowned in the sea one day.
oh yes they did.

- aretha franklin, mary don't you weep

straight ahead
the road is winding.

- abbey lincoln aminata mosaka, straight ahead

spiralsheep.livejournal.com

16. I read I Speak for the Devil by Imtiaz Dharker. Her poetry tends to confessional style, which I usually dislike, but Dharker uses that style to speak for herself and her characters so skillfully that I enjoyed this collection throughout. The language and structures are deceptively simple but manage to convey complexities and deeper meanings. The whole collection is complemented by Dharker's own illustrations, which highlight her interest in bodies and embodiments. I offer you two samples: the more intellectually representative poem and the more sensually typical poem.

Tags: british, scottish, islam, muslim, calvinist, british-asian, poetry

spiralsheep.livejournal.com

13. The Young Inferno by John Agard and Satoshi Kitamura is a verse retelling of Dante's Inferno embedded in a picture book. I liked Kitamura's stark, black and white, art style but in the art-as-storytelling stakes it seemed to me to lack variety. It also clashed with one of the text's spelled out messages: "My teacher said, 'You've got a point. Quite right. / It just shows that neither beast nor man / can be divided into black and white.' " Except this is a black and white book in several senses. Agard's verse text didn't work for me as either narrative or poetry. (Note to self: don't read retellings of Christian morality stories unless they're specifically subversive in some way.) However, I'm probably about as far from the target audience of hoodie-clad schoolboys as it's possible to be so who cares about my opinion anyway? I just hope this isn't picked up from the teen, graphic novel, section of the library by a reluctant reader who is consequently discouraged further. Agard writes good poetry but this isn't it. Kitamura's first and second illustrations are both interesting as art, especially the way Our Hero is represented as a negative (in the photographic sense) of himself, but the only illustration which wholly won me over is the fossil landscape in illo 4.

14. Too Black, Too Strong by Benjamin Zephaniah is an extremely powerful collection of individually skillful and soulful poems. Ben is one of the most humane people I've met and it shows through in every word of his work. Most people know him as a Rastafarian lyricist who wrote that "funny" poem about turkeys and Christmas, and maybe as that political poet who refused to accept the Order of the British Empire he was awarded, or that black British man who was bereaved of a family member by police violence (although that describes too many people), but his work is so much more: witty, political, memorial, deeply spiritual, widely literary, and linguistically sophisticated. There are several example poems at my dw journal.

15. Fiere* by Jackie Kay is her latest, 2011, poetry collection. I've loved Kay's writing since the first time I encountered it, years ago. Amongst other forms, she's an extremely accomplished poet in both Scots** and English. Kay's poems aren't generally confessional (in the strictest literary sense of that word) but they do contain enough autobiography that I feel some minimum background aids understanding, and that's provided in the brief blurb on the back. Kay is multiracial, her mother was a Scottish Highlander and her father was a Nigerian Igbo. She was born in Edinburgh and raised by white Scottish adoptive parents. There are two example poems, the ecstasy and the agony of human relationships, at my dw journal.

* "fiere", Scots, meaning "companion/friend/equal"
** Scots, which is primarily related to English, not Scottish Gaelic which is a different language.

Tags: women writers, african-caribbean, black british, britain, british, british-african-caribbean, caribbean, black scottish, scottish, guyanese, poetry, japanese, biracial, multiracial, children's books, sf/fantasy, fiction, guyanese-british, igbo, young adult

spiralsheep.livejournal.com

11. Selected Poems by Mimi Khalvati is a selection from three previous books, which I enjoyed cos, although her poetry tends to be allusive (and so I missed some of the meaning), Khalvati's use of language is like listening to music. Two example poems, which I found particularly pleasing for various reasons, at my dw journal.

Disclaimer (also for the tag wranglers): I have no idea whether Mimi Khalvati herself, whose online autobiography is sparse, would identify as non-white and/or Iranian (or how the word "Persian" might or might not be a label of choice for some ex-pat Iranians). She certainly writes about non-Eurocentric concerns.

12. Startling the Flying Fish by Grace Nichols is a sequence of poems about Caribbean life and history. For me every word was powerful. It's outstandingly the best contemporary poetry I've read for years. The blurb perfectly describes this work as "symphonic". I wasn't sure whether to post an example poem or not because, even though all these poems are excellent as stand-alones, they belong in the context of the whole, which is more than the sum of its parts (but I caved anyway and posted two examples on my dw journal). If you're interested in contemporary poetry or the Caribbean then you should read this book. I strongly recommend it. Nichols is an author with plenty of published work too so if you like this then there's plenty more (and she writes for children too).

Tags: women writers, poetry, iran, britain, british-iranian, iranian, guyanese, british, guyanese-british, african-caribbean, british-african-caribbean, black british, caribbean

spiralsheep.livejournal.com

6, 7, & 8. Three poetry collections by Moniza Alvi: Carrying My Wife, A Bowl of Warm Air, and The Country At My Shoulder (all three collections are available together in an omnibus also called "Carrying My Wife"). I have to admit, out of about 150 poems, there were three that did anything for me. I mostly found the expression of content incomprehensible, possibly due to the author reaching for innovative imagery, and the aesthetics of form uninteresting, but she's a comparatively popular mainstream Establishment poet so my judgement is extremely questionable (and I haven't heard her read her own work live). There are two of the poems, which did speak to me, at my dw journal.

9. The Redbeck* Anthology of British South Asian Poetry, edited by Debjani Chatterjee, is a nearly 200 page collection with a wide variety of content and style, which I enjoyed. There are two example poems at my dw journal and a third example poem but, of course, three poems can't reflect the breadth (or depth) of this anthology.

* I keep misreading it as "Redneck". ::facepalm::

10. The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan didn't appeal to me visually as much as the previous Tan books I've perused but the gist, that it's more important to be happy than to fit in, is another good theme, especially for kids.

Note to tag wranglers: "british-asian" and/or "british-south-asian" is correct usage and, yes, some of the authors (and/or their subjects) are also caribbean / african / &c.

Tags: women writers, poetry, anthologies, asian, british-asian, pakistan, britain, british, caribbean, african, bangladesh, india, indian, indian-british, pakistani, bangladeshi, pakistani-british, bangladeshi-british, british-south-asian, asian-australian, australian, chinese-australian, picture books

spiralsheep.livejournal.com

4. I read Chinua Achebe's Collected Poems. I felt as if I'm not the intended audience for the majority of these poems. I'm not "African"/Nigerian/Igbo. Only a handful of the poems, mostly early "Biafra" poems, seemed aimed at me and my level of understanding. Instead I felt the great privilege of being invited into someone else's conversation as a listening party. So I read and allowed the poems to sink into my mind without flailing about for full understanding, which I find is often a productive way to interact with poetry.

Achebe's 1960s idea of "Africa" and "African" seemed, to me, to be very much a product of its time. Achebe's work also, I thought, began by speaking from Africa/Biafra/Igboland and moved into speaking about Nigeria/Igboland. But in such a brief collection, with free-standing poems communicating on their own internal merits, it's probably foolish of me to try reading conclusions into the work, and also highlights my position as an outsider who is detached from the central conversation Achebe is involved in.

Excerpt from Knowing Robs Us

[...] had reason not given us
assurance that day will daily break
and the sun's array return to disarm
night's fantastic figurations -
each daybreak
would be garlanded at the city gate
and escorted with royal drums
to a stupendous festival
of an amazed world.

There are a sample Chinua Achebe poem, and related art by Chaz Maviyane-Davies, at my dw journal.

Tags: africa, african, igbo, nigerian, poetry

spiralsheep.livejournal.com

1. Bloodshot Monochrome by Patience Agbabi, is a pleasingly varied contemporary poetry collection with a strong emphasis on reinventing traditional printed-poem forms, especially in the sonnet sequence Problem Pages. I posted a sample poem and a video link at my dw journal.

Author bio: http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth163

2. The Red Tree by Shaun Tan, is a picture book full of complex and surreal images. The verbal story is minimal but effective, the art is stunning. I can't explain but I recommend you read this or one of Tan's other equally brilliant works such as Tales From Outer Suburbia, The Lost Thing, or The Arrival (no words at all)... or...

3. Eric by Shaun Tan, is a very short picture book with drawings in a deceptively simple style. Their meanings, and Eric's story, may be puzzled out by would-be readers here: Eric by Shaun Tan @ The Grauniad. It's only 12 pages and FREE TO READ (but Mr Tan got paid)! :-)

Author's website: http://www.shauntan.net/

Tags: women writers, poetry, asian-australian, british, picture books, black british, australian, chinese-australian

emma-in-oz.livejournal.com

2.9 Ranters, Ravers and Rhymers: Poems by Black and Asian Poets, Ed. Farrukh Dhondy (1990)

The collection is divided into sections - Black Britain, the Caribbean, India and Africa. There are recurring themes - identity and power in society.

I liked the collection in some ways, but I found it frustrating. It was clearly designed as a introduction - Dhondy says he aimed it at teenagers. But it lacks basic information that an introductory text needs - the date of publication of the poems, some information about the poets, maybe some annotations because there are references to political events of the 1970s and 80s that I have no idea about.

I also struggled with some of the dialect poems, especially the Caribbean ones. I found the Indian section easier as they are written in standard English. My eye just flows along the lines rather than having to puzzle out what each word means, leading to a very disjointed reading experience.

Naturally, the issue of language is one that the poets address. Eunice De Souza says in "Encounter at a London Party":

You are young and perhaps forgetful
that the Empire lives
only in the pure vowel sounds I offer you
above the din.

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Countee Cullen, Color (1925)

Cullen was a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance (and, cough, the only author from that period I have read).* I enjoyed his work - he is clearly a fairly traditional writer. His poetry rhymes, follows classical traditions and references classical and Biblical mythology. He was writing three years after *The Wasteland* came out, but might as well have been writing in the nineteenth century.

Cullen himself said: ‘I should be the last person to vote for any infringement of the author’s right to tell a story, to delineate a character, or to transcribe an emotion in his own way, and in the light of truth as he sees it... I do believe, however, that the Negro has not yet built up a large enough body of sound, healthy literature to permit him to speculate in abortions and aberrations which other people are too prone to accept as legitimate...’

* Not my Renaissance! The Renaissance for Aboriginal literature was probably... um, is probably now.

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My last book in the 50 books by POC challenge! It took me 2 years to do, I think. Or possibly 3 actually, though it was definitely an August that I started.

So, my review of Maya Angelou...

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