![]() ![]() The book is an intimate, mystical lens to gaze across time periods and literary modes and frames. Lazarus, recalled from the dead, is reprised in the history of the collective mind of a once enslaved and now resurrected people-a mind embodied in the individual mind of this magnificent poet and called back to life by his absolute freedom to speak." It is also a culmination of his insistent, original vision. "This book is Kamau Brathwaite's grand, retrospective understanding of his entire poetics-which has extended and developed and ramified across well over half a century of enormous human change. Fragments of reportage, song, and dream abut slippery linguistic ruins in his trademark Sycorax video style, which features wildly varying layout and typography." ![]() "Brathwaite's work here is jagged, politically engaged. If yu cd have brought me back from the dead.Īnd now i hear the voices from beyond the grave You don't have no memory on yr tongue.įor Lazarus. There's such an emptiness on this hillside. Lazarus pleads w/the poet fe help im out of im wound Filled with longing, rage, nostalgia, impotence, wisdom, and love, this book is moving in every sense of the word. The speaker's pain and outrage are almost overwhelming. Central to the book is a series of poems outlining the speaker's (the poet's) experiences with what he calls "Cultural Lynching." These poems speak of appropriation, theft, isolation, and exploitation, all within a context of an American hegemony that intensifies the racial politics and ageism underlying the events described. Brathwaite performs a kind of spiritual/aesthetic GPS in his poetry and is is a poet of undeniable stature, writing the final poems of his career. Tonally and typographically frenetic in the 'sycorax video style' he's been employing for decades, the work examines a major theme appropriate to a great poet in the late stages of his career: that of the afterlife. ![]() This book by the great Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite is characteristically sui generis, vatic, and strange, exhibiting ornery bravura. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |