Kwame Dawes - Böcker

After ten years of selecting great books from writers, new and established, Prairie Schooner celebrates the first decade of its Book Prize series by offering this collection of excerpts from each year's winners in fiction and poetry. Writers such as Brock Clarke, Anne Finger, Rynn Williams, and Paul Guest open windows to ordinary and fantastic experience showcasing the liveliness and power of contemporary literature. Greg Hrbek's darkly comic, genre-bending tales stand alongside Ted Gilley's stories about achieving bliss through pain and John Keeble's reflections on community and the difficulty of love. Here Shane Book's poems serve as an elegiac witness to suffering, while Kathleen Flenniken's poems consider ordinary women constructing their own significance, and Kara Candito's explore sex, loss, and human passions. Whether the topic is fantastic or quotidian, childbirth or monsters, South American airplane disaster or suburban Wisconsin, this writing carries us to the furthest reaches of human experience.

As if convinced that all divination of the future is somehow a revisioning of the past, Kwame Dawes reminds us of the clairvoyance of haunting. The lyric poems in City of Bones: A Testament constitute a restless jeremiad for our times, and Dawes’s inimitable voice peoples this collection with multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, groaning, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future. As the twentieth collection in the poet’s hallmarked career, City of Bones reaches a pinnacle, adding another chapter to the grand narrative of invention and discovery cradled in the art of empathy that has defined his prodigious body of work. Dawes’s formal mastery is matched only by the precision of his insights into what is at stake in our lives today. These poems are shot through with music from the drum to reggae to the blues to jazz to gospel, proving that Dawes is the ambassador of words and worlds.

The interviews in this book reflect a range of Caribbean voices from several generations, from poets influenced by a dynamic interplay between the popular culture of reggae, calypso, folk music and ""yard"" theatre to those whose work is closer to classical forms of literature and oral narrative.

The interviews in this book reflect a range of Caribbean voices from several generations, from poets influenced by a dynamic interplay between the popular culture of reggae, calypso, folk music and ""yard"" theatre to those whose work is closer to classical forms of literature and oral narrative.

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.

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.

Resisting the Anomie is the second book of poetry by Kwame Dawes, whose collection Progeny of Air, won Britain's prestigious Forward Trust Poetry Prize for Best First Book in the fall of 1994.In Resisting the Anomie, Dawes takes as his subject the anxiety of being far from home, the unease of not belonging, the sense of disconnection from culture and custom. Poems of Jamaica, of Canada, of Haiti; tightly controlled poems, wild and free poems, reggae poems; poems of rejoicing, of faith, love, anger and humour — Resisting the Anomie is a large collection of substantial works by a new and significant writer.

The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes’s family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality, and engages in an intimate dialogue with the reader—serious, confessional, alarmed, and sometimes teasing. Metrically careful and sonorous, these poems engage in a personal dialogue with the reader, serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualized spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry.

The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes’s family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality, and engages in an intimate dialogue with the reader—serious, confessional, alarmed, and sometimes teasing. Metrically careful and sonorous, these poems engage in a personal dialogue with the reader, serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualized spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry.

Kwame Dawes is not a native Nebraskan. Born in Ghana, he later moved to Jamaica, where he spent most of his childhood and early adulthood. In 1992 he relocated to the United States and eventually found himself an American living in Lincoln, Nebraska.In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his work-the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall.With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant.

Hilda Raz has an ability “to tell something every day and make it tough,” says John Kinsella in his introduction. Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been shows readers the evolution of a powerful poet who is also one of the foremost literary editors in the country. Bringing together all seven of her poetry collections, a long out-of-print early chapbook, and her newest work, this collection delights readers with its empathetic and incisive look at the inner and outer lives we lead and the complexities that come with being human.Showcasing the work of a great American voice, Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been at last allows us to see the full scope and range of Raz’s work.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the first major poet out of Africa's oldest republic of Liberia since the nation's founding and remains one of the most important poets from Africa. Spanning two decades of work, the poems in this collection tell stories of Wesley's homeland that would have otherwise been forgotten. As she recounts her life as a refugee, mother, wife, and African woman, Wesley also remembers the Liberians who were killed in the fourteen-year civil war, the hundreds of thousands silenced and unable to tell their own stories.In conversation with Africa and her new homeland of America, Wesley's craft is imbued with Grebo oral tradition, bringing her language alive as she makes the reader cry out in anger or laughter. On one page you may find reason to mourn the brutality of war, and on the next, a reason to laugh about the beauty of family or at the small wonders of everyday life. Poetry, to Wesley, is not about words; it is about the story, the story of the living seeking to give new life to both the living and those she calls the dead living.

In Wisteria, Kwame Dawes finds poignant meaning in the landscape and history of Sumter, a small town in central South Carolina. Here the voices of women who lived through most of the twentieth century – teachers, beauticians, seamstresses, domestic workers and farming folk – unfold with the raw honesty of people who have waited for a long time to finally speak their mind. The poems move with the narrative of stories long repeated but told with fresh emotion each time, with the lyrical depth of a blues threnody or a negro spiritual, and with the flame and shock of a prophet forced to speak the hardest truths. These are poems of beauty and insight that pay homage to the women who told Dawes their stories, and that, at the same time, find a path beyond these specific narratives to something embracingly human. Few poets have managed to enter the horror of Jim Crow America with the fresh insight and sharply honed detail that we see in Dawes’s writing. With all good southern songs of spiritual and emotional truth, Dawes understands that redemption is essential and he finds it in the pure music of his art. Dawes, the Ghanaian-born, Jamaican poet is not an interloper here, but a man who reminds us of the power of the most human and civilizing gift of empathy and the shared memory of the Middle Passage and its aftermath across the black diaspora. These are essential poems.

The best art has the uncanny ability not only to give pleasure to those who view it but also to inspire a desire to respond. The best artists are a force for all art, and renowned Gullah artist Jonathan Green's work has inspired a wide range of responses from artists around the world. In Seeking we see how Green's art prompts works of poetry, prose, and memoir. Seeking's evocative power lies in the intimacy of this dialogue, which speaks to the shared sense of landscape and culture that Green stirs in these writers, ranging from close friends and fellow artists from his home state of South Carolina to nationally established authors who regard Green's work as an important cultural institution. The contributors have allowed themselves to be challenged by Green's brilliance, his honesty, his intense spirituality, and his deep love of people. Inspired by a personal quest toward induction into a spiritual community, Green's painting Seeking is rich with history, myth, and truth. The writers in this collection have found fertile ground for their own responses to Green's work, and the result is an engaging and enlivening chorus of celebratory voices.Edited by Kwame Dawes and Marjory Wentworth, this collection features eleven colour paintings by Green in addition to a preface on the history of the project, information on the painting Seeking, and an artist's statement.

A collaboration between the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and the University of South Carolina Press, the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize is a celebration of accomplished and emerging poets linked together by their shared associations with the Palmetto State. Published on the seventh anniversary of this award series, Seven Strong features selections from the winning poets to date—Susan Meyers (2006), Ed Madden (2007), Ray McManus (2008), DeLana R. A. Dameron (2009), Worthy Evans (2010), Jennifer R. Pournelle (2011), and Julia Koets (2012)—with an introduction by editor Kwame Dawes and a foreword by South Carolina poet laureate Marjory Wentworth. Representing some of the best and brightest among South Carolina’s large population of poets, these writers offer compelling vantage points on themes of identity, memory, history (both social and personal), race, gender, and community. What emerges most clearly from this collection is a sense of the creative arts as grounded in connections to place. Be those locations real or imagined, local or far-flung, in the verses collected here, place—like the poets themselves—is always provocatively authentic. Seven Strong is then a road trip for us of the most enjoyable sort, with seven distinctive guides and a landscape that stretches from quirky to cantankerous, mournful to marvelous, but we never lose sight of South Carolina in the rearview mirror.