Giscome Road

by C.S. Giscombe

When Dalkey Archive published C. S. Giscombe's Here in 1994, Publishers Weekly called it a "powerful, understated meditation on place"; the African-American poet continues this meditation in Giscome Road. Concerned with specific locales in northern Canada named for the 19th Century Jamaican miner and explorer John Robert Giscome, the volume incorporates a variety of historical documents, maps, and dreams, to go "in & further in, " discovering and documenting music, racial dichotomies, sexuality, and the ways in which landscape itself is described.

Genres: Poetry

69 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1998

Reviews

[Geoff]

Having finished reading C.S. Giscombe's giscombe Road, I am struck by the links between the recovery of the Jamaican miner and explorer, John Robert Giscombe, and the single drop of black in Ellison's white paint in Invisible Man. Giscombe Road and Giscombe Portage are sites where maps, sounds, edges, past, and water come together. The poet braids these together to create a "trilling song" which explores identity in the remote and jagged spaces of land and memory.

[Sandra]

An on-the-spot meditation into what remains in a wilderness place settled and mined by the author's relative several generations ago; how what Giscome brought out of Jamaica echos in this distant locale of British Columbia for the author Giscombe. A beautiful study that bends our perceptions of place and its history and the people that make that history.

[Holly Raymond]

I like poems that try on cartographical or topological representation. I also like stuff with foldouts, and books with maps on the inside cover. So of course I like this a ton. Also, Giscombe is a great guy with good taste in shoes.

[Tara Betts]

Interesting book that I need to finish by a very smart, very kind man.