Red

Red joins George Elliott Clarke’s previous ‘colouring’ books―Blue and Black―in which he displays an expansive range of poetic forms and rhetorical poses. Its poems mix the candid sexuality of pre-Christian Rome with the pop sentimentally of Italian screen scores of the 1960s and 70s, drenching us in the brute violence of Titus Andronicus, the reflections of Malcolm X and the music of Charles Mingus (whose “bass sounds like a typewriter/Punctuating Ulysses”). Whether he situates his reader in his father’s Halifax cab, on a beach in Rhodes, or in front of Alma Duncan’s painting Young Black Girl, Clarke is ever sensitive to “the hard work of words,/The even harder work of love.” Red rings with Clarke’s lush voice, full-throated and unparalleled.

George Elliott Clarke is a revered artist in song, drama, fiction, screenplay, essays and poetry. His publications include titles in Braille, Chinese, Italian, and Romanian. The inaugural E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, the University of British Columbia, and Harvard. His recognitions include the Bellagio Center Fellowship (US), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, the Premiul Poesis (Romania), the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), Encyclopedic Poetry School: International Fellow (China), and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award.