Red

by George Elliott Clarke

Red joins George Elliott Clarke’s previous ‘colouring’ books– Blue and Black –in which he displays an expansive range of poetic forms and rhetorical poses. Its poems mix the candid sexuality of pre-Christian Rome with the pop sentimentally of Italian screen scores of the 1960s and 70s, drenching us in the brute violence of Titus Andronicus , the reflections of Malcolm X and the music of Charles Mingus (whose “bass sounds like a typewriter/Punctuating Ulysses ”). Whether he situates his reader in his father’s Halifax cab, on a beach in Rhodes, or in front of Alma Duncan’s painting Young Black Girl , Clarke is ever sensitive to “the hard work of words,/The even harder work of love.” Red rings with Clarke’s lush voice, full-throated and unparalleled.

Genres: Poetry

157 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

A seventh-generation Nova Scotian, George Elliott Clarke was born in 1960 in Windsor Plans, Nova Scotia. He is known as a poet, as well as for his two-volume anthology of Black Writing from Nova Scotia, Fire in the Water. Volume One contains spirituals, poety sermons, and accounts from 1789 to the mid-twentieth century; Volume Two collects the work of the Black Cultural Renaissance in Nova Scotia, which, in Clarke's words, "speaks to people everywhere about overcoming hardships and liberating the spirit." Currently on faculty at Duke University, he is now writing both a play and an opera on slavery in Nova Scotia, a reformulation of Shelley's The Cenci. He has won many awards including the 1981 Prize for Adult Poetry from the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia, he was the 1983 first runner-up for the Bliss Carman Award for Poetry at the Banff Centre School of Arts and 1991 winner of the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry from the Ottawa Independent Writers.

Books: Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (Pottersfield, 1983); Whylah Falls (Polestar, 1990, 2000); Provencal Songs (Magnum Book Store, 1993); Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems, 1978-1993 (Pottersfield, 1994); Provencal Songs II (Above/ground, 1997); Whylah Falls: The Play (Playwrights Canada, 1999, 2000); Beatrice Chancy (Polstar Books, 1999); Gold Indigoes (Carolina Wren, 2000); Execution Poems (Gaspereau, 2001); Blue (Raincoat, 2001); Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (UofT Press, 2002)

Reviews

[Kereesa · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I really do adore Clarke's gift for the straight jab and intense imagery, this collection was a sort of mixed bag for me; some pieces I truly enjoyed, and some were fairly mediocre. I much prefer his earlier work George and Rue, but I do find Clarke on the whole to be a fantastic poet and highly recommend his work in general.

Rec for fans of Clarke, fans of Canadian poetry, and especially for fans of African-Canadian/African-American poetry.

[Tara Borin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such tight control of language and voice in this wide-ranging collection of poems. It was a pleasure to read.

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