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    Midland: Poems
    Midland: Poems
    Midland: Poems
    Ebook102 pages38 minutes

    Midland: Poems

    By Kwame Dawes

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    About this ebook

    The winning manuscript of the fourth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize is also the exciting American debut by a poet who has already established himself as an important international poetic voice. Midland, the seventh collection by Kwame Dawes, draws deeply on the poet’s travels and experiences in Africa, the Caribbean, England, and the American South. Marked equally by a lushness of imagery, an urgency of tone, and a muscular rhythm, Midland, in the words of the final judge, Eavan Boland, is “a powerful testament of the complexity, pain, and enrichment of inheritance…It is a compelling meditation on what is given and taken away in the acts of generation and influence. Of a father’s example and his oppression. There are different places throughout the book. They come willfully in and out of the poems: Jamaica. London. Africa. America. But all the places become one place in the central theme and undersong here: which is displacement…The achievement of this book is a beautifully crafted voice which follows the painful and vivid theme of homelessness in and out of the mysteries of loss and belonging.”

    Midland is the work of a keen and transcendent intellect, a collection of poems that speaks to the landscape from inside, from an emotional and experiential place of risk and commitment.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOhio University Press
    Release dateDec 1, 2000
    ISBN9780821440926
    Midland: Poems
    Author

    Kwame Dawes

    Kwame Dawes's debut novel She’s Gone (Akashic) was the winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (Debut Fiction). He is the author of twenty-one books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. In 2016, his book Speak from Here to There, a cowritten collection of verse with Australian poet John Kinsella, was released along with When the Rewards Can Be So Great: Essays on Writing and the Writing Life, which Dawes edited. His most recent collection, City of Bones: A Testament, was published in 2017. His awards include the Forward Poetry Prize, the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Silver Medal, several Pushcart Prizes, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, and an Emmy Award. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and is Chancellor Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Dawes serves as the associate poetry editor for Peepal Tree Press and is director of the African Poetry Book Fund. He is series editor of the African Poetry Book Series—the latest of which is New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Sita)—and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2018 was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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    • 5/5
      Poderosa poesía telúrica que ahonda en las raíces y en el devenir de su voz poética. La búsqueda de las raíces, el encuentro consigo mismo y con el dolor son algunas de las líneas que Dawes explora prodigiosamente en los poemas que componen esta obra. Sus versos finales quizá resumen de mejor manera lo que es esta obra:
      ...trying to beat back that lament
      of a gospel song, blue and rentless as a truth,
      unfolding the apostrophe of the hung man dangling
      from a live oak like the worm's silk cocoon.

    Book preview

    Midland - Kwame Dawes

    I

    Inheritance

    O Christ, my craft and the long time it is taking!

    Derek Walcott

    I

    In the shade of the sea grape trees the air is tart

    with the sweet sour of stewed fruit rotting

    about his sandalled feet. His skin,

    still Boston pale and preserved with Brahman

    devotion by the hawkish woman

    who smells cancer in each tropical wind,

    is caged in shadows. I know those worn eyes,

    their feline gleam, mischief riddled;

    his upper lip lined with a thin stripe

    of tangerine, the curled up nervousness

    of a freshly shaved mustache. He is old

    and cared for. He accepts mashed food

    though he still has teeth—she insists and love

    is about atoning for the guilt

    of those goatish years in New England.

    A prophet’s kind of old. Old like casket-

    aged genius. Above, a gull surveys

    the island, stitches loops through the sea and sky—

    an even horizon, the bias on which

    teeters a landscape, this dark loam of tradition

    in which seeds split into tender leaves.

    II

    The smudge of colors spreads and dries in the sun.

    The pulpy paper sucks in the watercolor,

    and the cliché of sea and a fresh beach

    seems too easy for a poem. He has written

    them all, imagined the glitter and clatter

    of silver cuirasses, accents of crude

    Genoese sailors poisoning the air,

    the sand feeling for the first time the shadow

    of flag and plumed helmet—this old story

    of arrival that stirred him as a boy,

    looking out over the open plains,

    as he cluttered the simple island

    with the intrigues of blood and heroes,

    his gray eyes searching out an ancestry

    beyond the broad laughter and breadfruit-

    common grunts of the fishermen, pickled

    with rum and the picong of kaiso,

    their histories as shallow as the trace

    of soil at the beach’s edge where crippled

    corn bushes have sprouted. That was years ago;

    he has now exhausted the jaundiced language

    of a broken civilization.

    These days he just chips at his epitaph,

    a conceit of twilights turning into

    bare and bleak nights. He paints, whistling

    Sparrow songs while blistering in the sun.

    III

    The note pad, though, is not blank. The words start,

    thirteen syllables across the page, then seven

    before the idea hesitates. These days

    he does not need to count, there is in his head

    a counter dinging an alarm like the bell

    of his old Smith Corona. His line breaks

    are tidy dramas of his entrances

    and exits, he will howl before the darkness.

    This ellipsis is the tease of a thought,

    the flirtatious lift of a yellow skirt

    showing a brown taut thigh—a song he knows

    how to hum but can’t recall the lyrics, man —

    an airy metaphor—taken up

    by a flippant sea breeze going some place

    inland, carrying the image, snagged

    by the olive dull entanglement

    of a thorny patch. At eight he lays

    the contents of his canvas book bag

    on the sand, organizing the still life

    like honed stanzas. He scoops the orange pulp

    of papaya, relishing the taste of fruit, this bounty

    harvested from the ant-infested fragile tree

    that bleeds each time its fruit is plucked.

    The flesh is sunny. He knows the fishermen warn

    it will cut a man’s nature, dry up

    his sap; that women feed their men pureed

    papaya in tall glasses of rum-punch

    to tie them down, beached, benign pirogues

    heading nowhere. He dares the toxins

    to shrivel him, to punish him

    for the chronic genius of crafting poems

    from the music of a woman’s laugh

    while he chews slowly. A poem comes

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