School of Udhra

by Nathaniel Mackey

School of Udhra takes its title from the Bedouin poetic tradition associated with the seventh-century Arab poet Djamil, the Udhrite school of poets who, “when loving die.” Bedouin tradition, however, is only one of the strands of world revery these poems have recourse to. They obey a “bedouin” impulse of their own—fugitive, moving on, nomadic. Ogo the fox, the Dogon avatar of singleness and unrest, runs throughout, crossing and recrossing divided ground, primal isolate, insistent within the book’s cross-cultural weave.

The poems track variances of union and disunion- social, sexual, mystic, mythic- both formally and in their content. They return rhapsody to its root sense: stitching together. Threads ranging through ancient Egypt, shamanic Siberia, Rastafarian Jamaica, and elsewhere figure in, inflected by conjunctive and disjunctive cadences inspired by jazz, Gnaoua trance-chant, cante jando, and other musics.

"'Purgatorial stealth' (as School of Udhra puts it), within a startling progression, I find, of imageries, becomes the poem's enigmatic seductive, sometimes wavering, sliding traverse of a spiritual wilderness. I have no doubt that the book is a remarkable and daring testament that needs to be read and re-read for the unpredictable measure of involved enchantment it unfolds . . . A book of haunted pleasure." —Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock

"Nathaniel Mackey has said that in language we inherit the voices of the dead. In School of Udhra he transcribes immeasurable spaces of the dispossessed who call him runaway. This writing increasingly unleashes each skittish letter into the risk of syllabic stutter 'vatic scat' stagger. How else ever re-trace or re-member the speaker of a ghost in sentences we step across. Words or segments of lines, stab, cut, rift, rend, relate, blaspheme, and bless." —Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson

Nathaniel Mackey, recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers’ Award, is the author of Eroding Witness (1985), Whatsaid Serif (City Lights, 1998), Atet A.D. (City Lights, 2001), Bedouin Hornbook (1986), and Djbot Baghosus’s Run (1993), as well as Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993). He has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Duke University.

Genres: Poetry

87 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Poet and novelist Nathaniel Mackey was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida. He received a BA degree from Princeton University and a PhD from Stanford University.

Nathaniel Mackey has received numerous awards including a Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. Mackey currently lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Reviews

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the easiest collection to read but beautiful

[seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Except/the words’ recompense gave way/to rhythm,/runaway wish not to be done with/wandering,”

Baraka-Mackey-Moten. Erotic and intimate.