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Negro Mountain
A cross-genre poetry collection that troubles the idea of poetic voice while considering history, biology, the shamanistic, and the shapes of racial memory.
In the final section of Negro Mountain , C. S. Giscombe writes, “Negro Mountain—the summit of which is the highest point in Pennsylvania—is a default, a way among others to think about the Commonwealth.” Named for an “incident” in which a Black man was killed while fighting on the side of white enslavers against Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century, this mountain has a shadow presence throughout this collection; it appears, often indirectly, in accounts of visions, reimaginings of geography, testimonies about the “natural” world, and speculations and observations about race, sexuality, and monstrosity. These poems address location, but Giscombe—who worked for ten years in central Pennsylvania—understands location to be a practice, the continual “action of situating.”
The book weaves through the ranges of thinking that poetic voice itself might trouble. Addressing a gallery of figures, Giscombe probes their impurities and ambivalences as a way of examining what languages “count” or “don’t count” as poetry. Here, he finds that the idea of poetry is visionary, but also investigatory and exploratory.
In the final section of Negro Mountain , C. S. Giscombe writes, “Negro Mountain—the summit of which is the highest point in Pennsylvania—is a default, a way among others to think about the Commonwealth.” Named for an “incident” in which a Black man was killed while fighting on the side of white enslavers against Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century, this mountain has a shadow presence throughout this collection; it appears, often indirectly, in accounts of visions, reimaginings of geography, testimonies about the “natural” world, and speculations and observations about race, sexuality, and monstrosity. These poems address location, but Giscombe—who worked for ten years in central Pennsylvania—understands location to be a practice, the continual “action of situating.”
The book weaves through the ranges of thinking that poetic voice itself might trouble. Addressing a gallery of figures, Giscombe probes their impurities and ambivalences as a way of examining what languages “count” or “don’t count” as poetry. Here, he finds that the idea of poetry is visionary, but also investigatory and exploratory.
- GenresPoetry
91 pages, Paperback
Published October 6, 2023
49 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 15, 2024
A fascinating and complicated read. I definitely think this is one that needs to be visited multiple times in order to begin to figure out all the layers of metaphor and symbolism. I think a lot of stuff probably went over my head but I learned a lot. Interesting combo of poetry and prose.
May 25, 2023
The difficulty in reviewing Negro Mountain — with reviewing most poetry, really, a few outliers like John Donne being the exceptions — is that the processes and structures of poems are associative with brief intervals of linearity, whereas a review wants to be structured logically with brief intervals of associativeness. I found myself satisfyingly caught up in C. S. Giscombe’s preoccupations while also finding it difficult (impossible) to articulate what I think he’s getting at. Any step-by-step analysis struck me as potentially reductive: it wouldn’t come near to conveying the beauty of these poems. They have sharp edges. They build on one another, echo one another, call back to one another, elucidate one another. I thought I could hear Giscombe thinking.
So, a list.
1. Negro Mountain is a real place, “a long ridge of the Allegheny Mountains,” Wikipedia tells me, and the episode that slowly comes into clear view over the course of these poems really took place and really gave the mountain its name.
2. Nemisis (sic) or Goliath, a large African American man, was killed in a skirmish there, during the French and Indian Wars. He was fighting on the side of the whites. Who is “the dusky fellow at the roadside”?
3. Themes of the natural world being destroyed and returning — in dreams, possibly in reality as well.
4. Wolves. Wolves hybridizing with one another (red wolf, gray wolf), with coyotes, with dogs. Wolves in dreams. “ ... wolves came back. / (The dreams recur like days of a hot week.)”
5. Flight and escape. Capture. “Like many Negroes, I am interested in captivity and in the ideas of punishment and public sacrifice,” Giscombe writes, and in the same poem mentions “the STOP signs all down Liberty Road.”
Someone in these poems speaks of hurrying to make the boat to Canada. Insists on waiting for his sister.
An old white woman living on Negro Mountain can’t quite remember whether she really did see a wolf recently, but she clearly remembers a story about a Negro shot dead while running away from his owner. She speaks only to the poet’s white friend, who has accompanied him.
Have I made it clear that I mean to read this book again, and then again?
Thanks to the University of Chicago Press and NetGalley for the ARC.
So, a list.
1. Negro Mountain is a real place, “a long ridge of the Allegheny Mountains,” Wikipedia tells me, and the episode that slowly comes into clear view over the course of these poems really took place and really gave the mountain its name.
2. Nemisis (sic) or Goliath, a large African American man, was killed in a skirmish there, during the French and Indian Wars. He was fighting on the side of the whites. Who is “the dusky fellow at the roadside”?
3. Themes of the natural world being destroyed and returning — in dreams, possibly in reality as well.
4. Wolves. Wolves hybridizing with one another (red wolf, gray wolf), with coyotes, with dogs. Wolves in dreams. “ ... wolves came back. / (The dreams recur like days of a hot week.)”
5. Flight and escape. Capture. “Like many Negroes, I am interested in captivity and in the ideas of punishment and public sacrifice,” Giscombe writes, and in the same poem mentions “the STOP signs all down Liberty Road.”
Someone in these poems speaks of hurrying to make the boat to Canada. Insists on waiting for his sister.
An old white woman living on Negro Mountain can’t quite remember whether she really did see a wolf recently, but she clearly remembers a story about a Negro shot dead while running away from his owner. She speaks only to the poet’s white friend, who has accompanied him.
Have I made it clear that I mean to read this book again, and then again?
Thanks to the University of Chicago Press and NetGalley for the ARC.
March 17, 2025
Difficult, sure, but accessible in the end, although it took four or five reads.
The book starts with dreams that suggest the place in Pennsylvania, and its troubling connection to American history. The dreams have animals in them, threatening animals, and those recur throughout the book. There is a kind of notes section at the end, which first looks like an alphabetical list of sources, but really does provide just enough clues to go back and change the reading of the book.
The following sections, take those moments that were in the dreams, and builds on them. History comes in (and this is a fascinating example of how historical research can shape poems). And, yes, this is a history tied to, even shaped by, race.
Giscombe has always been comfortable mixing genres and this certainly does so too. There are lines sometimes, but it is hard to hear a rhythm in the lines. Yet these are poems. Poems because they work by association, one thing calling up an historical moment, for example, then that one calling up an image from the author's dreams, and that suggesting experience, and that suggesting another piece of research or literature. As a slow reading happens (and I had it by my reading chair for at least a year), and as the reader moves back and forth within the book, an emotional whole becomes clear.
Highly recommended for those readers who like a challenge in their reading. This one rewards the work!
The book starts with dreams that suggest the place in Pennsylvania, and its troubling connection to American history. The dreams have animals in them, threatening animals, and those recur throughout the book. There is a kind of notes section at the end, which first looks like an alphabetical list of sources, but really does provide just enough clues to go back and change the reading of the book.
The following sections, take those moments that were in the dreams, and builds on them. History comes in (and this is a fascinating example of how historical research can shape poems). And, yes, this is a history tied to, even shaped by, race.
Giscombe has always been comfortable mixing genres and this certainly does so too. There are lines sometimes, but it is hard to hear a rhythm in the lines. Yet these are poems. Poems because they work by association, one thing calling up an historical moment, for example, then that one calling up an image from the author's dreams, and that suggesting experience, and that suggesting another piece of research or literature. As a slow reading happens (and I had it by my reading chair for at least a year), and as the reader moves back and forth within the book, an emotional whole becomes clear.
Highly recommended for those readers who like a challenge in their reading. This one rewards the work!
April 21, 2023
Negro Mountain is a sweeping and magical collection of cross-genre poetry that examines the history of the highest point in Pennsylvania, Negro Mountain. Negro Mountain is in the Allegheny Range of the eastern United States and spans the Pennsylvania-Maryland border and the Mason-Dixon Line.
Taking the reader back to the 18th century, this collection starts off with the retelling of dreams that describe an incident that occurred in the 1750s and has seen been a hot topic of controversy since the 1920s when the landscape was declared to be the highest point of land in Pennsylvania by the US Geological Survey.
I learned a lot of history reading this text while also savoring the use of language Ciscombe engages to describe the racially charged and violent history that haunts this land. There is a darkness in these poems that mirrors that shadow presence that exists over this mountain and C.S. Ciscombe does a phenomenal job of speaking to the reasons to why.
Thank you to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!
Taking the reader back to the 18th century, this collection starts off with the retelling of dreams that describe an incident that occurred in the 1750s and has seen been a hot topic of controversy since the 1920s when the landscape was declared to be the highest point of land in Pennsylvania by the US Geological Survey.
I learned a lot of history reading this text while also savoring the use of language Ciscombe engages to describe the racially charged and violent history that haunts this land. There is a darkness in these poems that mirrors that shadow presence that exists over this mountain and C.S. Ciscombe does a phenomenal job of speaking to the reasons to why.
Thank you to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!
January 1, 2025
In the central contributions of this book, Giscombe uses fragmentary language that hovers around the edges of meaning like the wolves he refers to so often. I like the sections on "The Negro Mountains" and "Camptown" very much. The repetition of themes are isolated words such as "colossal" provide some links between the poems.
The last two of the "Seven Dreams" also have that mysterious, disjointed style. The others are more conventional descriptions recognizable as dreams.
I did not respond to or understand the purpose of the long "Notes on Region," which mixes together historic quotes, academic descriptions of natural phenomena, and unrelated asides.
The last two of the "Seven Dreams" also have that mysterious, disjointed style. The others are more conventional descriptions recognizable as dreams.
I did not respond to or understand the purpose of the long "Notes on Region," which mixes together historic quotes, academic descriptions of natural phenomena, and unrelated asides.
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December 22, 2023Totally went over my head tbh
February 25, 2024
tracing the mountain which traces the sky which traces the wolf which traces the peak which traces the path which traces itinerant iterative movement
April 17, 2025
A Unique combination of history and poetry, A great book!
October 8, 2023
With the sensibility of a grizzled woodsman, solitary in a cabin, Giscombe looks at the mountain ranges of, and surrounding, the Allegheny Plateau and merges what appears to be biography, local history, geography and myths replete with symbolic animals. His jaguars loose in the mountains of Pennsylvania evoke the jungles of South America, written in a naturalistic style of an earlier century in a tone associated with Caribbean poetry. Wolves become werewolves, roaming as far as Mississippi. A series of poems, labeled as dreams, of a landscape turned dreamscape, has Freudian implications. A section of found poems, fragments taken from historical documents, disguised as notes, ponders the differing myths over decades as to how the Negro Mountain came to be named.
Taken as a narrative and not a collection of singular pieces, Giscombe’s book is a look at the past, viewed through several stylistic lenses, as a return to the modernism of Pound and Eliot, following trails cut by William Carlos Williams. His is an unapologetic traditional grandeur, an unflinching belief in what poetry once did poetry can still do. A book destined as that rare find on some library bookshelf.
Thanks to NetGalley and the University of Chicago Press for an advanced copy
Taken as a narrative and not a collection of singular pieces, Giscombe’s book is a look at the past, viewed through several stylistic lenses, as a return to the modernism of Pound and Eliot, following trails cut by William Carlos Williams. His is an unapologetic traditional grandeur, an unflinching belief in what poetry once did poetry can still do. A book destined as that rare find on some library bookshelf.
Thanks to NetGalley and the University of Chicago Press for an advanced copy
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews