Traverse

by George Elliott Clarke

From Toronto’s poet laureate (2012–15) comes a new book that is a tour de force in confessional verse. This autobiographical sequence in 980 lines contains 70 stanzas of “skeletal sonnets” composed, astonishingly, in one day and one evening. Traverse is a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses, a great burst of imaginative energy and aesthetic reflection that celebrates a 30-year period of Clarke’s writing poetry.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2014

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

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

HAPPY POETRY MONTH!

april is national poetry month,
so here come thirty floats!
the cynics here will call this plan
a shameless grab for votes.
and maybe there’s some truth to that—
i do love validation,
but charitably consider it
a rhyme-y celebration.
i don’t intend to flood your feed—
i’ll just post one a day.
endure four weeks of reruns
and then it will be may!

**************************

WOOHOO GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE!!!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-sc...

this is a sort of autobiography-in-verse by george elliott clarke; a book thirty years in the making, describing his experiences as a writer, lover, son, father, and the poet laureate of toronto - a title he is quick to downplay as: (appointed under a mayor admittedly prone to crack).

he includes a disclaimer that leaves me with a million questions i want to be able to ask him over drinks:

Though Traverse is autobiographical, I have manumitted some names and omitted others. I have also overlooked many signal moments such as my debut tour, in April 1977, to Church Point, Nova Scotia (where I viewed snow flurries round a lighthouse); my Fall 1981 residence in a Toronto subway station; my April 1993 encirclement by gun-hefting border guards at Port Huron, Michigan (where my entry to the U.S. "to give a talk on poetry" inspired alarm); my surf-side, noon-sun mugging by three thugs in Salvador, Brazil, in November 2007; and my receipt of The Queen's inadvertently deferential nod in Halifax in June 2010 (She mistook me for a cleric: A reasonable error, given my surname.) Nor have I elaborated (or belabored) my poetics: "Canadian" by origin, but "African" by inclination. Thus, like Canuck poets, I dignify; like Black poets, I signify.

i mean, how can you not want to hang out with him after that?

the book that follows is filled with his rapid-fire gunshot words and his typically superb imagery:

XXXIV

Lightning could father rainbows, right?
One night in Digby, rain punctured my brother's roof,
while my voice funneled down an unctuous phone line,
trying to tunnel into Miz Lady's heart,
but she was laughing, I was flailing.
"Our" Love was truly "lost like lightning" (lb.).
Man, her wrong words hurt my throat
like I was draining absinthe.
Every maverick thought
leapt and pulsed with clean blood.
Now, the only rainbows fathered were black ink
and black vinyl 45s -
dark prisms of spilled gasoline, oozing,
then catching - like a cold or napalm.

XXXV

Round the Falls - epiphanic, nights brought
ice cream scooped up nigh a French Shore cathedral
and fully dressed sirens just as sensual
as undressed nymphs.
(Nay, call them nymphets;
but imagine nymphos.)
They slaved, gutting fish, but vroomed scarlet roadsters,
with room only for hugging, kissing, drinking,
simultaneously, yeah.
What geniuses of Beauty!
So sincerely, searingly, unerringly cute,
acute, cantilevered, frank, they were,
with nudity more naked than any autobiography,
and infinitely more honest…

and lo! the origin of my beloved book George & Rue:

XLIX

While I aided and abetted the apparition
of Beatrice Chancy, opera and play,
and handcrafted a movie picturing, but not depicting, Whylah Falls -
Virgo's One Heart Broken Into Song (1999) -
my one-and-only, one-and-only, my only-one Mom,
was dwindling away, vertigo pon vertigo.
But amid her passive - yet aggressive - decline,
she recollected two dissected cousins.
I had to dig up each cadaver outta Archives,
restore each, gaudy, to front-page news.
George and Rufus Hamilton demanded a long poem -
a novel - in which to be sumptuously shown,
to cleanse the criminal grime from their bones:
No whitewash, just light.

he is one of my very favorites, and reading this was a nice little insight into some of the inspirations for his pomes. you really need to get your hands on some of his poetry books if you haven't, because this dude writes poetry the way it ought to be written - all blood and sex and life, and you don't need to be on crack to recognize his brilliance.

come to my blog!

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Elliott Clarke's collection of nearly-sonnets functions as an autobiography of the poet in verse. It's a moving collection in part by how it moves linguistically and how flexible he makes the sonnet form. Yes, there are times when the poems slide into sentimentality--always the risk with confessionalism--but more often, the poems make sly gestures of linguistic association that are both surprisingly pleasing and pleasingly surprising.

[Mook · Rating 1 out of 5]

I heard George Elliott Clarke read some of his poetry live; he put so much energy into his performance, it was a great reading. I was hoping to relive some of that through his book. No such luck. Boring, repetitive, not really good.