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South of Here
Poetry. African American studies. "For Lydia, poetry is about everything--love, family, hate, the forbidden--everything. This book gives a new voice to poetry with the wildness of fire, with the wildness that only words can know"--Patricia Jabbeh Wesley.
- GenresPoetry
67 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2005
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August 2, 2007
In South of Here I found an exercise, volatile pairing of memory and language. The first poem begins as a series of couplets; however, by the fourth stanza, the careful, neat form is broken. This arrangement is important as it works like song, quickening the breath throughout different parts of the poem. The first break represents a break in the smooth psychological plane of the speaker, who informs us that her own moment of peaceful rumination on the idea of irises in the summer is broken by her mother’s talk:
Her mother’s body becomes part of the lexicon; one imagines the literal, the physicality: a bent back, curved spine, feet punctuating an ending, a footstep. But there is the figurative: a mother with no answers to a young daughter’s questions, a mother full of prepared pauses, pregnant. Even in the poem the mention of “verbal play” readied me for a volley of coded language, the disconnect between reader and poet mirroring the disconnect between daughter and mother.
And there are the colors: either white, red, or nothing, empty space filled by memory, as the perceived blackness in this poem is nothing but the horrid memory of abuse.
Like Kara Walker’s nightmare silhouettes, blackness in Melvin’s poem is negative space against a forefront of white. Even the mention of dangling black bodies is prepositional and covered in the image that follows of blue paint and new wood. The wild grass takes over the black school (again, blackness as people is cloaked), all exemplifying the overgrowth of hatred quelling a community.
Her mother’s body becomes part of the lexicon; one imagines the literal, the physicality: a bent back, curved spine, feet punctuating an ending, a footstep. But there is the figurative: a mother with no answers to a young daughter’s questions, a mother full of prepared pauses, pregnant. Even in the poem the mention of “verbal play” readied me for a volley of coded language, the disconnect between reader and poet mirroring the disconnect between daughter and mother.
And there are the colors: either white, red, or nothing, empty space filled by memory, as the perceived blackness in this poem is nothing but the horrid memory of abuse.
Like Kara Walker’s nightmare silhouettes, blackness in Melvin’s poem is negative space against a forefront of white. Even the mention of dangling black bodies is prepositional and covered in the image that follows of blue paint and new wood. The wild grass takes over the black school (again, blackness as people is cloaked), all exemplifying the overgrowth of hatred quelling a community.
Displaying 1 of 1 review