Elegguas (The Driftless Series & Wesleyan Poetry Series) - Hardcover

Brathwaite, Kamau

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0819569437 ISBN 13: 9780819569431

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Deeply felt requiems from an internationally celebrated poet

Kamau Brathwaite is a major Caribbean poet of his generation and one of the major world poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Elegguas―a play on "elegy" and "Eleggua," the Yoruba deity of the threshold, doorway, and crossroad―is a collection of poems for the departed. Modernist and post-modernist in inspiration, Elegguas draws together traditions of speaking with the dead, from Rilke's Duino Elegies to the Jamaican kumina practice of bringing down spirits of the dead to briefly inhabit the bodies of the faithful, so that the ancestors may provide spiritual assistance and advice to those here on earth. The book is also profoundly political, including elegies for assassinated revolutionaries like in the masterful "Poem for Walter Rodney."

Throughout his poetry, Brathwaite foregrounds "nation-language," that difference in syntax, in rhythm, and timbre that is most closely allied to the African experience in the Caribbean, using the computer to explore the graphic rendition of nuances of language. Brathwaite experiments using his own Sycorax fonts, as well as deliberate misspellings ("calibanisms") and deviations in punctuation. But this is never simple surface aesthetic, rather an expression of the turbulence (in history, in dream) depicted in the poems. This collection is a stunning follow-up to Brathwaite's Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan, 2005), winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

About this title

About the Author

KAMAU BRATHWAITE (1930–2020) was an internationally celebrated poet, performer, and cultural theorist. He won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Griffin Poetry Prize. A retired professor of comparative literature at New York University, Brathwaite lived in CowPastor, Barbados.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819569437
• ISBN 13: 9780819569431
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 136