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Lädt ... New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006von Ishmael Reed
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"One of the founding fathers of multicultural studies, Ishmael Reed first came to the attention of the literary world as a poet. Despite success as a novelist, playwright, essayist, and recording artist, he has never ceased to write poetry, delving into waters spiritual and political with his own unexpected and uniquely powerful voice. New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006 captures four decades of Reed's inimitable vision, an ongoing journey from New York and Chattanooga to Africa, Oakland, and Japan." "New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006 also includes Reed's libretto, Gethsemane Park (a contemporary Yoruban interpretation of the New Testament), and his translation of an excerpt of Fungawa's Igbo Olodumare (The Forest of God), as well as several lyrics which have been recorded by artists ranging from Taj Majal to Bobby Womack and Little Jimmy Scott." "In this volume, one of America's most esteemed and intrepid poets, whose "Beware Do Not Read This Poem" has been cited by Gale Research as one of about twenty poems most frequently studied in literature courses, shows why he has helped expand our cultural forefront from the 1960s to today."--BOOK JACKET. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)811.54Literature English (North America) American poetry 20th Century 1945-1999Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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Conjure still includes several of my all-time-favorite short poems: "There's a Whale in my Thigh," "The Piping Down of God," and "Dragon's Blood." According to the author's micro-vita appended to this volume, "Beware: Do Not Read This Poem" is also an all-time-favorite of literature instructors. Perhaps the best and most representative poem of this earliest set is the exquisite "I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra," a houngan's brag rebuking Christian tyranny with a mixture of Wild West and ancient Egyptian imagery.
The later materials continue in the same vein, with a tiny bit less anger and a little more sorrow, but Reed's sense of humor is undiminished. Although he no longer foregrounds the blazon of his school of Neo HooDooism, his methods and aims seem quite consistent with what came before. In the later work, his awareness of the (already much-realized) possibility that his poems would serve as musical lyrics more often leads Reed to use repetitive chorus forms and traditional structures, but even in the early pieces, there is a vivid aural sensibility that constantly tempts to reader to declaim them aloud for the benefit of their full force.
Reed insists that his poetry is not theological in its aims, despite its use of various non-Christian and counter-Christian tropes and images: "The key lesson that I do take from Yoruba religion is from the parable in which a traveler finds himself in a strange country, away from his gods, and the only god that he can depend upon is his own mind" (xix). But he makes no such disclaimers regarding politics. A political piece among the more recent work that I found especially striking as an expression of its own time was the 2001 "America United" (362-372). And one that read with eerie irony in the light of current events (police violence in late October 2011) was "Let Oakland Be a City of Civility" from 1999 (341-345).
After the recent poems, the book concludes with an opera libretto Gethsemane Park, and a prose narrative "Snake War" based on a translation of an excerpt from Fungawa's Igbo Olodumare (The Forest of God). The former is a sort of Godspell-like displacement of gospel events into the modern American city, in which Jesus is not a human hero but a discorporate orisha.
In an untitled verse from 1992, Reed wrote: "Ever get the / Feeling that your past / Is a hunter who knows the / Woods better than you" (327). In fact I do, and this four-decades-plus collection goes a way toward demonstrating why Reed might as well.