City Eclogue

by Ed Roberson

Poetry. African American Studies. Ed Roberson might no longer live in Pittsburgh, but the city in which he was born and raised still leaves its fragmented structures etched throughout his poetry. A city of hard work and hard times, the now-impoverished neighborhoods that had at one time stood as centers of jazz and art; the hills, the rivers, the skyscraping iron and steel, and the pain. Though most of the poems in this collection do not necessarily take place in Pittsburgh, there is a rhythmic fragmentation here painting portraits of urban life in general. Beauty, music, poverty, blood, and concrete seem to live within the line breaks, while breath-stopping pauses halt you just long enough so that--like at a smoky backroom jazz club--you can't wait to see what he does next.

Genres: Poetry, African American

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Charles Edwin (Ed) Roberson is a distinguished American poet, celebrated for his unique diction and intricacy in exploring the natural and cultural worlds. His poetic voice is informed by a background in science and visual art, coupled with his identity as an African American. Roberson has been an active poet since the early 1960s and has authored eight collections, including "Atmosphere Conditions" (1999) and "City Eclogue" (2006). Among his many honors are the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award (1998) and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award (2008).

Reviews

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poetry on the dissolution of place, of home, of urban decay transformed by capital into sterility. Ed Roberson deserves a larger readership than he has—among lists of praise for the "difficult" contemporary poets, I rarely see his name. Especially now with Google running awry and changing the city at such a rate, he is the prescient voice of my maternal home in Pittsburgh. The risk is made clear as to what is at stake, for community, for self, for cities, without any compromise on Roberson's part toward didacticism.

to have the culture

of petri dish architecture as
success grow on you
you have to sit still

in the air
conditioning a long time:
a green sloth green

from the algae
murals
frescoed on billboard stagnant

a company's
catchy logo lotions you
smooth

thing you on yourself
thinking the thing you
is definitely you

you's/use confused

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

from The Open
63 'Their buildings razed. they ghosts
their color that haze of plaster dust

their blocks of bulldozed air opened to light
take your breath as muc

by this kind of blinding choke as by the loss felt
in the openness

suddenly able to see
as if across a drained lake from below

a missing surface: the knowing everyone
by some common

immersion schooling you not drowned in exposure
the way the neighborhood

a village packing up and leaving raises you with
the catch

out in the open.
Suddenly able to see

People lived where it weren't open,'

Open / Back Up (breadth of field)
88 'To state the case of poetry
the most recent open field I've crossed
would have to be the block long park lost
in the midst of the security

of local campus mounted police.
Black people get stopped regularly
to show they have university
I.D. by the ones in cars; the auspice

of the animal mounted doesn't fly.
Really, neither do the comic cops. Nature
life and limb gone through divestiture
of place from point
reads to the lie
of open
breasts of field Elysian,
nor the narrow badge number of the gun.'

from Eclogue
131 ‘Here it’s flat and densely packed with people
unlike the empty open of the plain;
here our expanse the grown over dumpsite
of the meadowlands wetlands or the shore
is corps of engineered the bulldozer-beetle’s
ball of dung shines in it and somewhere the body
hidden in our shit to fake us innocent…
one of our jokes sometimes things rise and float.’
[...]
133 ‘We map our way with only the bearing

of surrounding life itself borderless
uncontrolled by the surface of our self.’
[...]
134 ‘The shadow of flesh casts how deep and far
a landscape of perspective? how round
a circumference enough to fit the living

world does a single life turning to its labor spin?
Take each story of a building as the radius
of expansion we make of the earth,’

---

from City Eclogue: Words for It
Beautifully flowering trees you’d expect
should rise from seeds whose fluttering to the ground
is the bird’s delicate alight
or the soft petal stepping its image
into the soil
but here come the city’s trucks
bumping up over the curb dropping
the tight balls of roots in a blueprint out
on the actual site in the street
someone come behind with a shovel will bury. (16)

Urban Nature
Neither New Hampshire nor Midwestern farm,
nor the summer house in some Hamptons garden
thing, not that Nature, not a satori-
al leisure come to terms peel by peel, not that core
whiff of beauty as the spirit. Just a street
pocket park, clean of any smells, simple quiet —
simple quiet not the same as no birds sing,
definitely not the dead of no birds sing:

The bus stop posture in the interval
of nothing coming, a not quite here running
sound underground, sidewalk’s grate vibrationless
in open voice, sweet berries ripen in the street
hawk’s kiosks. The orange is being flown in
this very moment picked of its origin. (83)

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

City Eclogue by Ed Roberson

Book where. Get a sense of what is said and taking what is said pump it up and put it into the histories. A history set like a chemistry set. But not about histories, not concerned with history/ies as an end. No end to. What is said. Sayings aftershock. Proceeds of an aftershock. The scene. The version. The double version. All that still shuffles what decisions to make. Which who we were when we are going there.

[Oscar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ruins of a modern city gets a harsh but humanistic treatment in Roberson's City Eclogue. As per the title, the shepherds gather and discuss what has befallen their flock--in this case the various citizens of NYC speaking on the destruction surrounding the city that they care for and in return cares for the shepherds. Strangely, many of the conversations feel solitary, as if the speaker is speaking to absence or speaking to everyone at once, which is to say we have some great isolated speech that echoes on the page (perhaps mimicking the isolation and desolation the speaker is in). Roberson's free jazz movements of repeated staccato phrases that spiral into each other also enhances this droning effect.

The initial poem, Stand-In Invocation, is a fractured sonnet that speaks to how the citizens of the city now treat each other (A New York scoping out instead of eye/contact.) that ends in total disruption of ould'ves that is restiched with a footnote (She knows the form, her tongue's just sharp and short of.) indicating the speaker has a sense of history and education but the immediacy of the breakdown in human relations in the city hurries the speaker past formal constraints.

This breakdown is not without a sense of hope and renewal that even from these cracked pieces of language and isolation, a new language can emerge to reestablish that essential communication necessary in urban living.

[Lee Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is actually pretty incredible. Ed Roberson is what happens when multiculturalism meets avante-garde. He has this incredible way of getting the most out of each word, using both its figurative and literal meaning in service of the poem, and he multiplies possibilities of meaning without taking away from the poem's purpose. If all opposites in poetry (high brow vs. low brow, accessibility vs. "experimental") could find a perfect balance together, then they've done so in this book. Ed Roberson is one badass poet.

[Joe]

Cover to cover, one of the most engaging books of poetry I've read this year. Funny thing is I read it last year but in the strobe light of a punishing workload I wasn't up to the task. This is a book that demands time--Roberson's lines are wound tight, move between image and idea in short, spry spaces, and thematics are explored through accretion over the course of sequences and the collection. Turning to my own reading, reminds me of Stevensian logopoetics, Pope L's vertical politics, WCW a la Paterson's attention to city and planning (but with more finely attending to race, dis/placement w/in this grid), Baraka's attn the socia-political significance detritus of the street, Frances Richards' swerves in Anarch between granular detail and high ecological concept but passages like this are all Roberson:

the living all have rusted out of
into ghosts are here
in the dirt the twisted
chrome-less tubing of cheap kitchenettes
the sea-changed sets of everything not worth
a repossession order but worth once all
they were
Worth this is what they were sold for

Written before 2008 but prescient RE: housing collapse, emptying of vulnerable neighborhoods, displacement in place. See also Shockley's domestic ideology.

"a stomach / of feet"

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

The central sequence of this volume, "Beauty's Standing," is a brilliant evocation of the psychic landscape of urban America, seen from an angle which cross-references African American history--especially the unfulfilled promise of the Civil Rights Movement--with the commercial wilderness. In that sequence and in several of the be-bop inflected shorter lyrics--there are references to Charlie Parker and Theolonious Monk--Robeson does a beautiful job of capturing the feeling of being on edge, feeling like there's no way to live a sane life in the insane world around him. So there's a lot to like here, but there are also a large number of poems I couldn't catch the rhythm on. That's a jazz risk, of course; not everything works, but there's a deeper problem with the ones that don't--a tendency to retreat into abstractions and/or obscure specifities (it's not accidental that he quotes Pound's Cantos). Parker and Monk both had a lyrical genius that carried through the ragged moments; I don't find that here.

[Gabriel Costello · Rating 5 out of 5]

He manages to mix such definite objects, the city, it’s occupants, the monuments they erect with more abstract ideas of what it is to live day to day. I can’t really do him justice but Roberson is unmatched in my opinion when it comes to making beautiful, opaque statements about life.

[Vicky]

June book club with Ed Roberson in attendance