Annette Debo - Böcker

Uncovering how poetry refigures Black history to imagine a more just present and future“Poets are lyric historians,” proclaimed Langston Hughes. Today, historical poetry offers a lyric history necessary to our current moment—poetry with the power to correct the past, realign the present, and create a more hopeful, or even hoped-for, future. The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry focuses on six of today’s most celebrated poets: Elizabeth Alexander, Natasha Trethewey, A. Van Jordan, Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, and Camille T. Dungy. Their works reimagine the interiority of Black historical figures like the so-called Venus Hottentot Sara Baartman and the would-be spelling champion MacNolia Cox, the African American Native Guard who fought in the Civil War and the unknown victims of domestic violence, Jack Johnson and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Medgar Evers and those freed and enslaved in the early nineteenth century. These poets shift the power dynamic in revising our shared history, reconfiguring who speaks and whose stories are told, and writing a past that frees readers to change the present and envision a more just future.

This volume presents two rare works by the American poet H.D.: ‘Within the Walls’, a collection of fourteen short stories, and ‘What Do I Love?’, a set of three long poems. Written during World War II in London, where H.D. chose to stay despite offers of refuge in the U.S., the stories and poems recount her experiences during the Blitz. In taut simplicity, these texts capture the essence of war-torn London with the authority of a poet with her boots on the ground.Annette Debo’s nuanced introduction sets the cultural scene for these works. Using extensive archival research, she positions the literature in three contexts: H.D.’s personal life, the story of women civilians at war, and the international history of World War II. Debo helps us comprehend a time and place that transformed “H.D. Imagiste” into the bold war writer evidenced in this volume and also opens our eyes to the impact of these war experiences on H.D.’s more well-known works.

This volume presents two rare works by the modernist writer H.D.: Within the Walls, a collection of fourteen short stories, and What Do I Love?, a set of three long poems. Written during World War II in London, where H.D. chose to stay despite offers of refuge in the United States, the stories and poems recount her experiences during the Blitz. These texts capture the essence of war-torn London from the perspective of a woman with her boots on the ground.Annette Debo's nuanced introduction sets the cultural scene for these works. She positions the literature in three contexts: H.D.'s personal life, the story of women civilians at war, and the international history of World War II. Debo helps us comprehend a time and place that transformed ""H.D. Imagiste"" into the bold war writer evinced in this volume and opens our eyes to the impact of these war experiences on H.D.’s better known works.