|
Books by Eugene Redmond
Sides of the River (1969)
/
Sentry of the
Four Golden Pillars (1970) /
River of Bones and Flesh and Blood
(1971) /
Songs
from an Afro/Phone (1972)
In
a Time of Rain & Desire (1973) /
Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas (2003) /
Drumvoices
* * * *
*
Books by Henry
Dumas
Ark of Bones
(1970) /
Poetry for
My People (1971) /
Play Ebony
Play Ivory (1974)
/
Jonah and the Green Stone
(1976)
Rope of Wind and Other Stories
(1979) /
Goodbye,
Sweetwater (1988) /
Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected
Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989)
Echo
Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas
* * *
* *
Play Ebony Play Ivory
By Henry
Dumas
Edited by
Eugene B. Redmond
134 pp.
New York / Random
House. / Cloth $5.95 Paper $2.95
Reviewed By Julius Lester
Henry Dumas was 34 when he was killed by a white policeman
in 1968. Fortunately, his creative potential had matured enough so that
his poetry can be read without one's judgments being influenced by the
reverberating echoes of the bullets that ended his life.
Dumas's poetic range was wide, and in an older, more accomplished
poet, this would have indicated versatility. Dumas was still the
poet-in-search-of-his-subject, however, exploring moods, themes and
forms with uneven results. Many of his short poems read like fragments
that might have found their form, if there had been time. Other poems
suffer from excessive imagery, coyness and manufactured black rage. A
section of blues lyrics is embarrassingly bad and a poem called "Cuttin
Down to Size" is an unfortunate excursion into anti-Semitism.
Dumas's talent asserts itself more effectively when he writes from
within an experience rather than above it. In the autobiographical
"Son of Msippi," there are overtones of Jean Toomer
("Bare walk and can stalk / Make a hungry belly talk"), and an
intentional Whitmanesque image:
|
out of the loins
of the leveed lands
muscling its American vein
the great Father of Waters . . .
|
A few lines later, however, he shatters this perception of the river
with an image that could have been written only by a black poet:
"the bone-filled Mississippi."
Dumas's authentic voice is heard most clearly when he writes from
within what seems to have been his subject: Africa and Nature. He is the
first Afro-American poet to speak convincingly in the voice of an
African.
|
Once when I was tree
flesh came and worshipped
at my
roots.
My ancestors slept
in my
outstretched
limbs and listened to flesh
praying and entreating
on his knees.
|
Dumas does not personify nature; he becomes it. Nature is not an
object of beauty, but a living, articulate organism.
"Love Song of a Lamb" is an erotic poem by a lamb.
|
i speak to you
ram of strength
ram of beauty
why do you come
toward me leaning
behind my honed shadow?
|
In the sparse lines of "Hunt," the poet speaks as a dog.
The majestic "Ngoma" effectively creates and melds the sound
of "ngoma" (Swahili for drum) with the heartbeat of the unborn
child in the stomach of the woman narrator of the poem. It is a stunning
achievement.
Besides the African voice, Dumas also had a lyric one which was
beginning to approach the purity of haiku
|
The lights gathering
on the night lake
sing a thousand songs
of the sleeping sun
|
At his best, Henry Dumas was the most original Afro-American poet of
the sixties, and this book is the portrait of a poet in the budding
time. Thanks to a white policeman, there will be no flowering.
Source: New York Times Book Review (9/19/75) * * *
* * About the Editor (in 1975)
Eugene B. Redmond, poet, essayist and playwright, is professor of
English and Poet-in-Residence at California State University,
Sacramento. He has taught at several United States colleges and
universities, including Southern Illinois University, where he was a
colleague of Henry Dumas. Redmond's books of poetry are
Sides of the River (1969,)
Sentry of the
Four Golden Pillars (1970),
River of Bones and Flesh and Blood
(1971),
Songs
from an Afro/Phone (1972), Consider Loneliness As These Things, and
In
a Time of Rain & Desire 1973); his LP recording of poetry, Bloodlinks
and Sacred Places, was released by Black River Writers in 1973. He
edited
Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A
Critical History (1976) and
Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas (2003)
During the sixties, Redmond edited Midwestern community newspapers
and served for two years as senior consultant to Katherine Dunham at the
Performing Arts Training Center in East St. Louis. His writings have
appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including Black
World, Journal of Black Poetry, The Black Scholar, Open
Poetry, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Black Orpheus, American
Dialog, Discourses on Poetry and The New Black Poetry.
* * *
* *
* * * * *
 |
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
|
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 23
January 2012
|
