Multitudes: Poems Selected & New - Softcover

Weaver, Afaa Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1889330418 ISBN 13: 9781889330419

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 2000

Synopsis

The poems of Multitudes comprise an African-American opera of towering ambition and scope: there are arias and recitatives, whispers and shouts, growls and coos, formal interludes and symphonic improvisation, all set within a revelatory social and cultural context.

It is difficult to speak of a poet like Weaver, whose gift is large, lush, and expansive. The difficulty is multiplied when considering a Selected Poems, where the magnitude and range of the poet's accomplishments are fully displayed. One could spend a good deal of time merely on the works of lyrical intensity, such as Weaver's series of poems "Lamentations" which explores the painful permutations of a father's illness and a mother's death. One could marvel over the compressed emotion this series somehow manages to contain and, in the end, to release in the reader.

But this would be to ignore the sharply etched portrait poems, such as "Sub Shop Girl," "Bootleg Whiskey," and "Walnut Cinema." It would not fully explain the straightforward narrative power of poems like "The Robe," in which a young boy is cruelly shown his place in the sexual hierarchy of grown women. And it would give no hint of the poet's ability to compose such recent, experimentally daring poems as "Mojo Momba," "Piggly Wiggly," and the breathtakingly associative "A Composition for White Critics . . . " which, among its many effects, brilliantly satirizes "postmodern" literary ethos.

And to speak of any individual poems would not capture the extent of Weaver's operatic accomplishment in Multitudes. Weaver is a poet of rare grace, power, and honesty. His work will be read simply because the poetry is superb.

Finally, this is a book that embodies the fraught matter of African-American masculinity, in a way that a thousand essays could not begin to match. Multitudes is a clear window into the soul of the African-American male. In this sense it possesses an ambitious, manifest social value that contemporary poetry can rarely claim. Weaver's Selected will be read for the pleasures of its poetry, yes. But it will also be valued for the urgent illumination it provides into one of the central issues of our country and our time.

Afaa Michael Weaver (b. Michael S. Weav

About this title

About the Author

Afaa Michael Weaver (b. Michael S. Weaver) is a veteran of fifteen years as a blue collar factory worker in his native Baltimore. In 1986, he completed his B.A. at Regents College and, in 1987, his M.F.A. at Brown University. His first book of poetry Water Song appeared in 1985 and was followed by My Father s Geography (1992), Stations in a Dream (1993), Timber and Prayer (1995), and Talisman (1998). He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and, most recently, a fellowship from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Mr. Weaver is the editor of Obsidian III and the holder of an endowed chair at Simmons College in Boston, where he is the Alumnae Professor of English.

From the Inside Flap

Afaa Micheal Weaver is a poet of angels and demons. His roots are wide and deep, going back to writers of mystical and devotional poetry like Traherne or the early Blake, and conjoined with, at times, the moods (though not the rhythms) of blues. I love the truth and purity in the lines of his poetry.

Alicia Ostriker Fanon said: to speak is to assume a culture and to bear responsibility for a civilization. Afaa Micheal Weaver has done that in his poems. He speaks to us in tongues that are cultured by timber and prayer, black and white galaxies. This poet has been to the carnival in the city and returned with the knowledge that the country is alive because of his benediction. Amen. A woman. Amen.

Sonia Sanchez

Reviews

The poems of this sixth collection vary from near-religious ekphrases on Marc Chagall paintings (from Stations in a Dream) to the poet's not exactly sensitive "Mojo Mamba" ("My johnson got a reputation"). If most of the poems don't reflect such poles of subject matter and dictionAtending much more toward the formerAthe possibility of having them together seems to be the point here. Having put in 15 years of factory work before earning a B.A. and M.F.A., Weaver now holds an endowed chair at Boston's Simmons College. Many of the poems are well-constructed free-verse autobiographies, delving into the speaker's misspent youth, conditions on the steel mill floor, or simply describing "The Poet Reclining" or "Going to Church with C.W." Together, they describe a late '60s-early '70s coming of age and intellectual awakening, one that culminates in a series of "Lamentations" and in the book's final poem, from a section of new work. "Composition for White Critics Who Think African American Poets Cannot Work in Contexts of Pure Concerns for Language ," (its full title clocks in at 60 words) is dedicated to Jorie Graham, and attempts to parody the long-lined style and circumlocution of her recent books: "such/ burdens as being less than an adult require the synthesis of forms, this grove of pointed hedges where all time/ changes and gain or you lose or you understand there is no death." While the book as a whole is not quite a successful challenge to the literary powers-that-be, Weaver's stories of hardship and joy ring clear and true. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Weaver (Timber and Prayer) is quite possibly the most highly touted unknown poet working today (witness an introduction by Arnold Rapersad and blurbs from Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez). Five previous volumes of poetry have passed almost in obscurity and are mostly out-of-print. Just as those faithful to his work have witnessed his name change (with earlier books, he was Michael S. Weaver), readers watch as, during the 15 years this volume spans, his acceptance of growing up black in America turns into African American pride. Compare, for example, the early lyric "A Young Aristocracy," (where the poet finally appreciates those fathers who labored 16-hour shifts for "the grand feeling of buying a new row home") with the recent poem, "Enemies," (in which he quotes a co-worker: "Nigger is not really/ a person's color. A nigger cannot be a person." The only place these poems disappoint is in some of his newest work, where the spirit of play overshadows sensitivity. Highly recommended.DRochelle Ratner, formerly with Soho Weekly News, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1889330418
• ISBN 13: 9781889330419
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160