I look back on the year in poetry by selecting two favorite reviews for each of the monthly review columns that my colleague Rebecca Morgan Frank and I wrote during the course of the year. I also review Kwame Dawes’s Sturge Town, Farnoosh Fathi’s Granny Cloud, Melissa Kwasny’s The Cloud Path, Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living, Paul Muldoon’s Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, Laura Newbern’s A Night in the Country, and Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse.
Here’s my review of Kwame Dawes’s Sturge Town:
Sturge Town bestows the continuing gift of Kwame Dawes’s extraordinary eloquence to re-center Anglophone poetry in a place of moral equipoise, the sonorous counter-song radiating from the post-slavery, post-colonial lands of the Caribbean and Africa.
Divided into sections each titled with phrases about light, this collection named after the poet’s family village, one of the first Jamaican towns created for freed slaves, contemplates the paradox of a worldly radiance enhanced with the darker shades of human meaning, “the white light that consumes / shadows, that turns this body / of riverbed brown into something / transparent like an ochre- /colored piece of cotton flapping / in the air.”
The voice exemplifies an ideal of gravitas, forthright and equitable in the deployment of its emphases, intimate yet crafted in the weight and swing of its cadences. “I am the author of my shame, / the wounded and the worried,” he writes, of the need for prayer, “and I close / my eyes to push away the darting lights / speeding toward my center.”
With the voice widening from his center to assume the music of others, a “Mammy,” a father, an alter ego named Robert Johnson, Dawes crosshatches the world in the illuminated shadows of Sturge Town, extending the ochre transparency of the Jamaican and Ghanaian landscapes of his past across the midwestern prairies and English cities of his present. “By three o’clock the walls are strained with shadows, / these colonial walls that we have kept, despite the revolution / and the new dialect of independence, kept for their history.”
(From the cover of Paul Muldoon’s Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, Farrar Straus Giroux.)