This collection reasserts the significant work of the writer and intellectual Neville Dawes, whose poetry has been unavailable since the late 1950s. A lifelong Marxist and a lover of English literature, Dawes’s concern for the rural Jamaican working class is evident in the poems that celebrate his youth in the village of Sturge Town, Jamaica. Written between 1950 and 1970, these inspiring poems show that the strength provided by heritage can overcome the difficulties posed by the social and political hardships of modern life. An introduction and several poems written by Dawes's son, Kwame Davis, are also included.
Gomer, an Old Testament harlot, was the non-conformist wife of the prophet Hosea. In Dawes' contemporary reinterpretation of this Bible story, he presents a beautiful and sometimes erotic exploration of the cost of arriving at freedom with an uneasy grace. Dawes examines the insidious qualities of power, the confining nature of gender roles and the limits of protest. Through Gomer's journey, readers are asked to consider how each one of us is able to express our own defiance, as well as to tally the costs of our individuality.
Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, finalist. "Dawes's verse has an expressive power and lyric resonance that can be attributed to a trans-Atlantic consciousness weaned on the spiritual sources of reggae."--New York Times Book Review "Raised in Jamaica, Dawes takes some of his cues, and this book's title, from reggae music. But his voice in these long and short poems and sequences selected from each of his many books, which began appearing in the mid-1990s, is crystal clear, accessible and serious, mixing a timeless myth-making energy with a strong contemporary conscience..." --National Public Radio "This first U.S. selection from the Jamaica-bred, Nebraska-based poet (he also has a reputation in Britain) is his 16th book of verse in just 20 years; it reveals a writer syncretic, effusive, affectionate, alert to familial joys, but also sensitive to history, above all to the struggles of African diasporic history--the Middle Passage, sharecropper-era South Carolina, the Kingston of Bob Marley, whose song gives this big book its title. Dawes is at home with cityscape and seascape, patois and transatlantic tradition." --Publishers Weekly " Dawes] is highly original and intelligent, possessing poetic sensibility that is rooted and sound, unshakeable and unstopped, both in its vibrancy and direction. He writes poetry as it ought to be written."--World Literature Today "Dawes asserts himself as man and artist and finally, with grace achieved and grace said, sits down to begin life's tragic feast . . . a writer of major significance."--Brag Book "The notion of a reggae aesthetic--of the language moving to a different rhythm, under different kinds of pressure . . . underpins all Dawes' work as poet."--Stewart Brown Born in Ghana, raised in Jamaica, and educated in Canada, Kwame Dawes is a dynamic and electrifying poet. In this generous collection, new poems appear with the best work from fifteen previous volumes. Deeply nuanced in exploring the human condition, Dawes' poems are filled with complex emotion and consistently remind us what it means to be a global citizen. From "The Lessons": Fingers can be trained to make shapes that, pressed just right on the gleaming keys, will make a sound that can stay tears or cause them to flow for days. Anyone can learn to make some music, but not all have the heart to beat out the tunes that will turn us inside out. . . Kwame Dawes is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, two novels, four anthologies, and numerous essays and plays. In 2009 he won an Emmy Award for his interactive website, LiveHopeLove.com. Since 2011 he has taught at the University of Nebraska, and lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.
After ten years of living and working in South Carolina, of trying to manage a writing career that spans the USA, the UK and Jamaica, the question of where was home had become insistent. In this deeply personal narrative, Dawes explores the experiences that bring him to indecision.
When his father dies in suspicious circumstances, Ferron Morgan's trauma is increased by the conflict within his family and his father's friends over whether the death is the result of medical negligence or a political assassination. Ferron has lived in awe of his father's radical commitments but is forced to admit that, with the 1980s' resurgence of the political Right in the Caribbean, his father had lost faith, and was 'already dead to everything that had meaning for him'. Ferron's response to the death is further complicated by guilt, particularly over his recent failure to protect his fiancee, Dolores, from a brutal rape. He begins, though, to investigate the direction of his life with great intensity, in particular to confront his instinct to keep running from trouble." "This is a portrayal of Jamaica at a tipping point in its recent past, in which the private grief and trauma condenses a whole society's scarcely understood sense of temporariness and dislocation. For both Ferron and the society there has been the loss of 'the corpse of one's origins' and the novel points to the need to find a way back before there can be a movement forward." --Book Jacket.
This eight-piece boxed set, an African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) project, features the work of seven African poets, with an introduction by Kwame Dawes, APBF series editor, and Chris Abani. The boxed set is an annual project starting in 2014 to ensure the publication of seven chapbooks by African poets through participating publishers. Publication is made possible through Slapering Hol Press, in association with APBF and the literary journal Prairie Schooner, with support from The Poetry Foundation. The chapbook contains: • Mandible by TJ Dema • The Cartographer of Water by Clifton Gachagua • Carnaval by Tsitsi Jaji • The Second Republic by Nick Makoha • Ordinary Heaven by Ladan Osman • Our Men Do Not Belong To Us by Wasan Shire • Otherwise Everything Goes On by Len Verwey
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