With all good southern songs of spiritual and emotional truth, Dawes understands that redemption is essential and he finds it in the pure music of his art. Dawes, jamaican poet is not an interloper here, the Ghanaian-born, but a man who reminds us of the power of the most human and civilizing gift of empathy and the shared memory of the Middle Passage and its aftermath across the black diaspora.

Few poets have managed to enter the horror of Jim Crow America with the fresh insight and sharply honed detail that we see in Dawes’s writing. In wisteria, kwame dawes finds poignant meaning in the landscape and history of Sumter, a small town in central South Carolina. These are essential poems. Here the voices of women who lived through most of the twentieth century – teachers, beauticians, seamstresses, domestic workers and farming folk – unfold with the raw honesty of people who have waited for a long time to finally speak their mind.

These are poems of beauty and insight that pay homage to the women who told Dawes their stories, at the same time, and that, find a path beyond these specific narratives to something embracingly human. The poems move with the narrative of stories long repeated but told with fresh emotion each time, with the lyrical depth of a blues threnody or a negro spiritual, and with the flame and shock of a prophet forced to speak the hardest truths.

Used book in Good Condition.

City of Bones: A Testament

The lyric poems in city of bones: a testament constitute a restless jeremiad for our times, groaning, and Dawes’s inimitable voice peoples this collection with multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future. As if convinced that all divination of the future is somehow a re-visioning of the past, Kwame Dawes reminds us of the clairvoyance of haunting.

Dawes’s formal mastery is matched only by the precision of his insights into what is at stake in our lives today. These poems are shot through with music from the drum to reggae to the blues to jazz to gospel, proving that Dawes is the ambassador of words and worlds. As the twentieth collection in the poet’s hallmarked career, City of Bones reaches a pinnacle, adding another chapter to the grand narrative of invention and discovery cradled in the art of empathy that has defined his prodigious body of work.

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Head Off & Split: Poems

Finney's poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother's wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president's final State of the Union address.

Artful and intense, dishonor, fragment, Finney's poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, cut off, or throw away, dice, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime. Winner, 2012 siba book award for poetry nominee, 2012 naacp image award for outstanding literary work in poetry the poems in nikky finney's breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, 2011 National Book Award for Poetry Winner, 2012 GLCS Award for Poetry Winner, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina.

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Lindy Lee: Songs on Mill Hill

Eureka Mill

However, the book is much more than documentary. Rash, giving us at once intimacy and perspective, whose grandparents and parents worked in the Eureka Mill interweaves his family's personal history with the broader texture of mill life, heart and understanding. It is even more remarkable if the book is set where we live, a place we thought we'd been.

These poems make up a dramatic and lyrical portrait of the migration of poor Buncombe County farmers to a mill village outside Chester, S. C. The asheville citizen-times writes: "every now and then a book comes along that transports us so thoroughly to another time and another way of life that, when we finally put it down, our own lives don't quite look the same.

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The Essential W.S. Merwin

Merwin beautifully demonstrates why Merwin has been one of America’s most decorated and important poets for more than 60 years. The washington post “Merwin is one of the great poets of our age. Los angeles times book review“merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page; he has made for himself that most difficult of all creations, an accomplished style.

Helen vendler, that cares about vision and the possibilities of poetry, New York Review of Books“It is gratifying to read poetry that is this ambitious, by a poet who is capable of so much change. The nation The Essential W. S. Poet laureate and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in hawaii, within the palm forest where he wrote, “On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.

”. I never made promises. Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time. W. S. Merwin traces a poetic legacy that has changed the landscape of american letters: seven decades of audacity, A Mask for Janus, rigor, and candor distilled into one definite volume curated to represent the very best works from a vast oeuvre, from his 1952 debut, to 2016’s Garden Time.

The essential W.