Sturge Town Poems
Book - 2024
In this stunning volume, acclaimed poet Kwame Dawes explores the mythic, ancestral, and spiritual journeys that make up a life. The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes's family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality, and engages in an intimate dialogue with the reader--serious, confessional, alarmed, and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualized spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian o...r taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry.
- Subjects
- Genres
- Poetry
Autobiographical poetry
Myths - Published
-
New York, N.Y. :
W. W. Norton & Company
2024.
- Language
- English
- Main Author
- Edition
- First American edition
- Item Description
- "First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Peepal Tree Press Ltd."--Title page verso.
- Physical Description
- 149 pages ; 22 cm
- ISBN
- 9781324076315
- I. …the rapid softening of light…
- Before the Return
- Traveling
- Reburial
- The Prodigal Converses with the Land
- Before the Memory
- After the Deluge
- Welsh
- Night Music
- Gated
- Post Traumatic
- The Last Duppies
- Recall
- Wanderer
- Portfolio Latinamericano
- The Man in the Blue Coat
- Gardenia Leaf on a White Wall
- Sturge Town
- II. …all of light's fruitfulness…
- It Bruises, Too
- A Year
- Rehearsal for Lovemaking
- What a Father Gives
- Fatherless
- The Child Learns of Death
- New Revenant
- Keratoconus
- It Begins with Silence
- Fish, Serpent, Egg, Scorpion
- Not Joy's Prophet
- Against the Elegy
- Elegiac
- The Forgettable Life
- Irie Ites
- Deathwatch
- At Anchor: The Real Situation
- Intimations of Greatness
- Departure
- Mourning Sky
- Stucco
- In the Wilderness
- At the Cemetery
- Baptism of Dust
- Condolence
- Elegy for the Candle Maker
- After "It Bruises, Too"
- III. … slowly, from shadow to light…
- Human Rights
- Bones in the Soil
- The Vanishing
- The Making of a Poet
- Mendacity
- Vagrants and Loiterers
- Eshu or Ambition
- Sorrow
- Work
- The Favor of Politicians
- On Hearing News of Another Shot Black Man
- Against Erasure
- IV. …I close my eyes to push / away the darting lights…
- Los Ojos del Mundo
- Cathedral
- Post-Elegy
- How I Pray in the Plague
- Making a Deal
- When We Pray
- Faith Healing
- Undertaker at the Village Cemetery
- Decubitus in Five Frames
- Horns
- The Body
- The Remnant
- Washing Women
- The Darkest Elation
- Struggle, Escape, Ecstasy
- Mist
- Light Home
- V. …Build me a house of light…
- Ode to the Clothesline
- The Mathematician
- Three Latter-Day Duppies
- The Reunion
- Rain
- On Becoming
- The Unspeakable Things
- After the Biopsy
- Fishing
- Vestal
- February Light
- In This Saying
- Sturge Town Redux
- Acknowledgments
Review by Library Journal Review