The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems

L.E. Phillabaum Poetry Award

by Marilyn Nelson

Soaring images, rhythmic language, and wry humor come together in these three narrative poems that explore travel from an African American historical and social perspective. A cab ride turns into an amazing encounter with the driver, an amateur physicist whose ideas about space and time travel spark the poet's musings on chutzpah and artistic ambition. A trip to Triolet, a Creole village in the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius, leads the poet to ponder the past and present as she reflects on the ironic complexities of the slave trade and its legacy shared by so many peoples. And in "The Cachoeira Tales," longing to take her family on a journey to "some place sanctified by the Negro soul," the poet finds herself in Brazil's Bahia, along with a theater director, a jazz musician, a retired commercial pilot, an activist, a university student, and two mysterious African American women whom they meet along the way. In rhymed couplets, each pilgrim tells a story, and the result is a rollicking, sensual exploration of spirit and community, with a nod to Chaucer and to traditional Trickster tales.
Using her remarkable ability to educate and inspire, Marilyn Nelson demonstrates the power of travel to transform our imaginations. We have long known that travel broadens; in these poems, it also deepens and makes wiser.
Joined skin to skin, we moved like molecules
in the great, impossible miracle
of atmosphere, swaying to the music,
all eyes on the stage, all hearts attuning
themselves in beautiful polyrhythmy,
one shaking booty. On one side of me
a young man danced; I felt his muscled warmth
flow into mine, his pure, sexual strength.
On my other sides young women danced, whose curves
bumped me softly, dancing without reserve,
hands waving in the air, releasing scent
fragrant as nard. We danced in reverent,
silent assent to the praise-song of drums.
-- from "Olodum" of "The Cachoeira Tales"

Genres: Poetry, School

64 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2005

About the author

Marilyn Nelson is the author of many acclaimed books for young people and adults, including CARVER: A LIFE IN POEMS, a Newbery Honor Book and Coretta Scott King Honor Book, and A WREATH FOR EMMETT TILL, a Printz Honor Book and Coretta Scott King Honor Book. She also translated THE LADDER, a picture book by Halfdan Rasmussen. She lives in East Haddam, Connecticut.

For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/marilyn-...

Reviews

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked Nelson’s Selected Poems, Fields of Praise, which was published in 1997. This, her most recent volume, is a slender, thematic collection of two sequences with an introductory poem, “Faster than Light.” The first sequence is called Triolets for Triolet. The first triolet refers to a French verse form; the second to a village by that name in Mauritius. There are eight eight-line poems in this two page sequence that is a testament to the resilience of creole peoples: “Indigenous to no land, only to chance, / despite world history’s struggle to weed us out, / we thrive on two seas and three continents.” The main part of the book is the narrative sequence of poems, almost a travelogue of a visit to Brazil made by Nelson and a group of family and friends. Intended as an ancestral pilgrimage that shrunk from its initial African destinations for lack of money and safety, the poem recount a visit where kinship is discovered in many corners, even as differences of class and circumstance also surface. The book isn’t slight but it does seem a little offhand, like literate, highly engaging postcards from a sophisticated traveler and scholar.

[Mahala Helf · Rating 5 out of 5]

For everyone whose ancestors passed through The Gate of No Return, AND for anyone who had traveled to see and hear echoes of past and future lives. Better than The Canterbury Tales(maybe i should re-read?)

[Jessi Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good set of poems!