Duppy Conqueror
New and Selected Poems
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"[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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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; in the title poem from his first book, "Progeny of Air," "propellers undress the sea;/ the pattern of foam like a broken zip/ opening where the bow cuts the wave." Yet he is drawn more often to life stories: his troubled brother, his own relocations, Marley and Marley's widow Rita, the archetypal wanderers of the American South: "Hurl me through memory," he writes in "Carolina Gold," "and I will return... with the stories strangers/ tell me at the crossroads." Thirty-nine new poems speak to and about the characters in August Wilson's plays: "You, August, have carried in your belly,/ every song of affront your characters/ have spoken.... and in this cacophonic chorus/ we find the ritual of living."
