Tim Seibles - Böcker

This collection, from one of America’s foremost African-American poets, is crisply comic, disalarmingly frank, and aurally bold. It threads the journey from youthful innocence to the whittled-hard awareness of adulthood. Along the way it immerses the reader in palpable moments —the importance of remembering, the complexity of race, and the meaning of true wakefulness.

One Turn Around The Sun is a panorama of poems that attempt to define the twilight during which a person becomes caretaker of parents and begins to grind against that old saying, “Life is too short”. The book also studies the intricacies of being a self, a particular personality shaped by forces seen and unseen, both knowable and not. At times, the various voices might be considered characters that agree and sustain one perspective. In other cases, contending sensibilities imply an underlying argument. This is especially true of the book within the book, which is entitled “The Hilt”.Several questions drive this collection, the most central being how can a person stay sane when so often socio-political circumstances mock all efforts to create a liveable world. This is a book intended to bolster an ongoing engagement with life at a time when running away is a great temptation.

Voodoo Libretto is in many ways a book of memories, a chronicle of both the personal and the political sensibility of a black baby-boomer. Driven by a restless and wide-ranging imagination, the poems are sometimes humourous, sometimes deadly serious, sometimes erotic, sometimes mystical, and occasionally all of these things at once.