Sturge Town Poems

The contemplative latest from Dawes (Nebraska) surveys a series of comings and goings both personal and historical. Taking its title from one of the first free villages founded by formerly enslaved people in Jamaica, the collection explores departures and returns from a postcolonial perspective, reflecting on a lifetime of forging a self through poetry. "I built my own myth/ of departure," Dawes writes in the title poem as the speaker imagines visiting an abandoned family house in Jamaica that has fallen into ruin. "The Making of a Poet" ends on the lines "Call me a voyeur, call me a kind of slut,/ but I still carry the transgression of indulgent/ watching, spying, in the shelter of the night." Throughout, storytelling serves as a powerful tool to grapple with the impossibility of return. In a poem about a deceased sister, he again ponders this layered theme: "I live in another country. The place where her bones rest/ is nostalgic for me. For too long, I have not visited/ that sun-beaten patch of earth to stand mute,/ then speak for want of doing something better." Wise and generous, this illustrates a poetic journey toward self-understanding. (July)

Award-winning poet and novelist Dawes's (Bivouac) latest poetry collection takes its title from one of the earliest free villages in post-slavery Jamaica. It feels almost Yeatsian with its haunted past, and like Yeats with his tower, Dawes depicts a journey to an ancestral home in quiet, lyrical, sometimes painful poems, exploring the memories of a lifetime. In a sense, it is a travelogue of nostalgia, a guide to a world of haunted places, each known only by "the blood that has been shed there." The waves of the Atlantic curling around the ankles of a preacher as he baptizes a young girl are suddenly a "garden of bones," bearing forgotten fishermen and enslaved people. Filled with lyrical monologues and shimmering like the sand still wet from the waves, this book, like a folk tale or an ancient myth, is possessed by subliminal power. VERDICT Like one of his heroes, Bob Marley, Dawes changes not just the way readers look at the world but the lens through which they see reality. His is a transcendent vision, filled with tenderness, curiosity, and compassion for what has been and what might be.--Herman Sutter