Midland: Poems (Hollis Summers Poetry Prize) - Hardcover

Dawes, Kwame

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0821413554 ISBN 13: 9780821413555

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2000

Synopsis

The winning manuscript of the fourth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize is also the exciting American debut by a poet who has already established himself as an important international poetic voice. Midland, the seventh collection by Kwame Dawes, draws deeply on the poet's travels and experiences in Africa, the Caribbean, England, and the American South. Marked equally by a lushness of imagery, an urgency of tone, and a muscular rhythm, Midland, in the words of the final judge, Eavan Boland, is &;a powerful testament of the complexity, pain, and enrichment of inheritance. ... It is a compelling meditation on what is given and taken away in the acts of generation and influence. Of a father&;s example and his oppression. There are different places throughout the book. They come willfully in and out of the poems: Jamaica. London. Africa. America. But all the places become one place in the central theme and undersong here: which is displacement. ... The achievement of this book is a beautifully crafted voice which follows the painful and vivid theme of homelessness in and out of the mysteries of loss and belonging.&;

Midland is the work of a keen and transcendent intellect, a collection of poems that speaks to the landscape from inside, from an emotional and experiential place of risk and commitment.

About this title

About the Author

Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana, grew up in Jamaica, and studied and taught in New Brunswick, Canada. He has published five volumes of poetry, an anthology of reggae poetry, and a critical volume on reggae music and literature. His first book of poems, Progeny of Air, won the prestigous Forward Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

Reviews

Reading the sensuous poetry of Dawes, one's first impression is of immersion in the atmosphere of the Caribbean, "the stench of wisteria crawling its pale purple/ path through a dying swamp." (Born in Ghana, Dawes grew up in Jamaica and now teaches at the University of South Carolina.) Ultimately, however, Midland takes the reader on an autobiographical journey to exile and self-discovery. Dawes is less concerned with reggae than with the need to speak the truth about "the generation that understood the smell/ of burning flesh." The 11-page title poem, "Midland," a "dialect of ire" unfolding like "the hung man dangling/ from a live oak," addresses the burden of "ash and tar of a Sumter lynching" with fortitude. In graphic language, he insists that one look beneath "affinities of skin, sin, and suffering" to the roots of a brutal inheritance. Awarded Ohio University's Hollis Summers Poetry Prize 2000, this book superimposes landscapes of Africa, Jamaica, and the United States, transforming the poetry of protest into a compassionate search for the "dusty graves" of his ancestors. These poems form "hieroglyphs of belonging" that help us come to terms with a complex heritage of intolerance and progress.DFrank Allen, Northampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Dawes' redolent poems are seeded with questions of inheritance. For instance, he portrays an old man painting on a tropical island beach, watched by a skeptical younger man, pen and notebook in hand and memories of colder places in mind. Born in Ghana, raised in Jamaica, educated in Canada, and currently on the faculty of the University of South Carolina, Dawes is cued to the spirituality of place--its prayers and ghosts--and writes with both elegance and poignancy of a search for ancestors and "hieroglyphs of belonging." Musing on his desire for home and knack for adaptability, he sees himself as a "chameleon of suffering," but there is nothing superficial about Dawes' empathy as he confronts the inexplicableness of genocide and slavery. The anguish of the dead and the helpless and the guilt of the living shadow each sensuously beautiful poem, each a quest for contact with the past and a talisman for the future. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0821413554
• ISBN 13: 9780821413555
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104