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Cardinal
Tyree Daye's Cardinal is a generous atlas that serves as a poetic "Green Book"-- the travel-cum-survival guide for black motorists negotiating racist America in the mid-twentieth century. Interspersed with images of Daye's family and upbringing, which have been deliberately blurred, it also serves as an imperfect family album. Cardinal traces the South's burdened interiors and the interiors of a black male protagonist attempting to navigate his many departures and returns home --a place that could both lovingly rear him and coolly annihilate him. With the language of elegy and praise, intoning regional dialect and a deliberately disruptive cadence, Daye carries the voices of ancestors and blues poets, while stretching the established zones of the black American vernacular. In tones at once laden and magically transforming, he self-consciously plots his own Great Migration: "if you see me dancing a twos step/I'm sending a starless code/we're escaping everywhere." These are poems to be read aloud.
- GenresPoetryAfrican American
80 pages, Paperback
First published October 6, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
January 2, 2021
Tyree Dave’s Cardinal occupies that space that all journeys manage to do: between places and people; the physical and spirit; history, present, future; and especially the journeys that manage to lead to oneself. These poems have a cadence and a lyricism propelling movement as much as the collective journey they takes us on.
‘Every road isn’t a way out, some circle
back like wolves, you can’t get lost on them
and they won’t lose you, others wait
for you to run out of gas then come alive
with what your mother said would take you.
Every road promises something like a father does,
but when you arrive the town is empty, and you wait
like a child questioning everything, the road itself
laughing like a drunk man falling into a roadside ditch.
The road I’m walking now is howling and full of moon,
hopefully it’ll lead to myself,
hopefully they’ll take me home.’
excerpt from “By Land”
‘Every road isn’t a way out, some circle
back like wolves, you can’t get lost on them
and they won’t lose you, others wait
for you to run out of gas then come alive
with what your mother said would take you.
Every road promises something like a father does,
but when you arrive the town is empty, and you wait
like a child questioning everything, the road itself
laughing like a drunk man falling into a roadside ditch.
The road I’m walking now is howling and full of moon,
hopefully it’ll lead to myself,
hopefully they’ll take me home.’
excerpt from “By Land”
May 2, 2023
4.5 stars
July 25, 2022
This is a beautiful, elegiac, tragic, brief book. Family was also one of the central themes of Daye’s first collection, River Hymns, but here we typically see family either through the metaphors of earth (work, inheritance, damage, healing, growth, death, etc) or birds (such as the titular cardinal, which makes numerous—and varied—appearances). Daye artfully expresses both tragedy and hope by writing about the earth, agriculture as both crippling work and creative expression.
Safety is another recurring theme—it’s absence and/or its impermanence. I recently read White Rage, and this text by a southern Black man about history, heritage, and insecurity dovetails tragically well with it.
I can’t stop thinking about some of the lines,
“Before I saw the ocean and took a picture of it on my phone, / I wanted to place an ocean in my mother’s backyard. / I’ve always known it to be immeasurable” (Oceans on Either Side of Me);
“All of her dreams she scattered / like chicken feed across the yard, / my mother, aunts, and uncles ate / those chickens and they sowed those dreams into us. I purple under the windowsill of those lives” (Where She Planted Hydrangeas).
Safety is another recurring theme—it’s absence and/or its impermanence. I recently read White Rage, and this text by a southern Black man about history, heritage, and insecurity dovetails tragically well with it.
I can’t stop thinking about some of the lines,
“Before I saw the ocean and took a picture of it on my phone, / I wanted to place an ocean in my mother’s backyard. / I’ve always known it to be immeasurable” (Oceans on Either Side of Me);
“All of her dreams she scattered / like chicken feed across the yard, / my mother, aunts, and uncles ate / those chickens and they sowed those dreams into us. I purple under the windowsill of those lives” (Where She Planted Hydrangeas).
April 22, 2021
The movement of place and the consistent flapping of the pages created a quick motion that moved me through this collection. While the personal momentos of family pictures and family reflection were the anchor for this collection, it felt rushed in and underdeveloped in places. The poems were working without each other, but in many ways were forced to work together. The repeated images of birds, squash, the moon, etc. added a nice element of how things that are so familiar can change when leaving them behind, but it also cast a shadow of tiredness and monotony with those recurring images. As the collection drew to a close, I was no longer excited by these metaphors, no longer surprised. I felt that this collection did not allow me to settle or to grow.
August 15, 2022
I am an old white man raised in the South during the 60s. My book review is not about my differences with Mr. Daye, yet about what we share in a world view. His poems are important and interesting for those willing to slow down and take them in .
Birds & wings, moon & stars, fields & oceans are used to illuminate what comes of death and small towns. Stuff I grew up on. Our favorites are 10, 16, 17, 19, 24, 27, 29, 34, 37, 41, 44, and 45. The rest were nice … but maybe we’ll come back to them.
Here's the good:
“I want her green thumbs wound around my wrist telling me to stay longer”
“My mother always in the background shaking her head – she could hear us leaving already.”
“I want to jar the soil under her feet in the last place she stood.”
Here’s the great:
“I think if God is a white man he sits low in his chair and won’t but only sometimes make eye contact with the angels.”
“I don’t like what I have to be here to be.”
Here is the goddam awesome:
“we’ve decided a long time ago the question is not how can black people pray to Jesus? It’s how can white people?”
Tony McLean Brown, Author “A Happy Guide to a Short Life”
www.HappyGuidetoaShortLife.com
A Happy Guide to a Short Life: A Response to MS Quindlen's Fine BookA Happy Guide to a Short Life: A Response to MS Quindlen's Fine BookTony Brown
Birds & wings, moon & stars, fields & oceans are used to illuminate what comes of death and small towns. Stuff I grew up on. Our favorites are 10, 16, 17, 19, 24, 27, 29, 34, 37, 41, 44, and 45. The rest were nice … but maybe we’ll come back to them.
Here's the good:
“I want her green thumbs wound around my wrist telling me to stay longer”
“My mother always in the background shaking her head – she could hear us leaving already.”
“I want to jar the soil under her feet in the last place she stood.”
Here’s the great:
“I think if God is a white man he sits low in his chair and won’t but only sometimes make eye contact with the angels.”
“I don’t like what I have to be here to be.”
Here is the goddam awesome:
“we’ve decided a long time ago the question is not how can black people pray to Jesus? It’s how can white people?”
Tony McLean Brown, Author “A Happy Guide to a Short Life”
www.HappyGuidetoaShortLife.com
A Happy Guide to a Short Life: A Response to MS Quindlen's Fine BookA Happy Guide to a Short Life: A Response to MS Quindlen's Fine BookTony Brown
January 3, 2025
"Ode to Small Towns
This where all the roadside memorials are,
pink wreaths and dirty teddy bears.
This where a man walked when he wanted to fly.
This is where he lay down and later died.
This where the train tracks folded the town in half.
This where the man who died loved a woman,
that's his heart you hear, not the train.
This where I ran the dream-colored woods
and did not know why. This where I believe
a dog is buried. This where I danced
in the long moonlight of a field.
This where a woman planted ghost peppers.
This where she thin her blood with root water.
This where you can see the whole town.
This where the moon never goes.
This where my grandmother hid some dreams.
This where my dead may have met.
This where they'll bury me.
This where I shot a bird from smoke-smelling sky.
This where it fluttered, fell."
Copyright Credit: Tyree Daye, "Ode to Small Towns" from Cardinal. Copyright © 2020 by Tyree Daye.
Source: Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)
This where all the roadside memorials are,
pink wreaths and dirty teddy bears.
This where a man walked when he wanted to fly.
This is where he lay down and later died.
This where the train tracks folded the town in half.
This where the man who died loved a woman,
that's his heart you hear, not the train.
This where I ran the dream-colored woods
and did not know why. This where I believe
a dog is buried. This where I danced
in the long moonlight of a field.
This where a woman planted ghost peppers.
This where she thin her blood with root water.
This where you can see the whole town.
This where the moon never goes.
This where my grandmother hid some dreams.
This where my dead may have met.
This where they'll bury me.
This where I shot a bird from smoke-smelling sky.
This where it fluttered, fell."
Copyright Credit: Tyree Daye, "Ode to Small Towns" from Cardinal. Copyright © 2020 by Tyree Daye.
Source: Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)
August 13, 2023
Day 13 of the Sealey Challenge.
.
This is a very tight, very focused collection of poems. I’d say the main theme is finding freedom or finding escape, which are not necessarily the same, and the imagery of wings is everywhere. Wings of birds, of angels, wings sprouting from people’s backs or from their house dresses. Daye is extremely focused on his own flight to freedom, to the ocean, to perhaps be free of brutal ancestral memory and yet also carrying a wish to free his ancestors themselves. There is a lot of field imagery (both slavery related and moving forward from there), the growing of squash, the entwining of vines, the battering our hands take as we do the work of living and surviving. Images of trains keep popping up as well. These are poems for his family, for their history, for the memories you can’t let go of and the ones you wish you would.
.
My favorites were:
Ode to a Common Clothes Moth
From Which I Flew
Miss Mary Mack Realizes Flying Is Just Running with Wings
.
This is a very tight, very focused collection of poems. I’d say the main theme is finding freedom or finding escape, which are not necessarily the same, and the imagery of wings is everywhere. Wings of birds, of angels, wings sprouting from people’s backs or from their house dresses. Daye is extremely focused on his own flight to freedom, to the ocean, to perhaps be free of brutal ancestral memory and yet also carrying a wish to free his ancestors themselves. There is a lot of field imagery (both slavery related and moving forward from there), the growing of squash, the entwining of vines, the battering our hands take as we do the work of living and surviving. Images of trains keep popping up as well. These are poems for his family, for their history, for the memories you can’t let go of and the ones you wish you would.
.
My favorites were:
Ode to a Common Clothes Moth
From Which I Flew
Miss Mary Mack Realizes Flying Is Just Running with Wings
Read
December 22, 2022These honest poems on loving a place you can’t ever leave, not really. A body can leave, but not the soul. The skin can leave, but not the heart. This kind of honest loving means noticing the dead birds on the walk in the springtime along with the field song of crickets that enchant summer nights. This kind of honest loving means reckoning with human bodies and blood while never forgetting the glory of a grandmother’s bed of hydrangeas. This kind of honest loving means one memory returns another, the way “songbirds return songs to one another across harvested fields.”
Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/article/12-...
Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/article/12-...
January 9, 2021
Place and nostalgia and generations and the cosmos are themes that recur through this collection. The themes are big, but the poems here also feel very finely situated, in northeastern North Carolina, encounters with the Atlantic, and in the kitchens and backyards of the color photos included in the book. Cardinal usually manifests as the bird in Daye’s poems; I also couldn’t help thinking of cardinal directions, or guideposts for understanding the world.
January 4, 2021
Powerful, and deeply moving! Daye crafts a poetic critique, reflection, and hope. In few words, he presents a world that many choose not to see, and opens his heart to what cannot be known by those outside his experience. I know I will return to this several times to soak in and savor its revelation.
December 18, 2022
3.5 rounded up. Tyree’s chapbook uses the same image bank for every poem; this device for me was stretched too far and the poems began to feel like bingo cards of cardinals, fields, wings, blue houses, and tobacco leaf. Imagery could have dwelt that bit further in surprise. I bet the next collection will be great.
June 29, 2025
"Leaving is necessary some say // There is a whole ocean between you and a home // you can't fix your tongue to speak"
Compressed reflective family grief poems. I heard Tyree Daye speak on the ekphrastic at AWP (check out his collages!) and I grabbed this book upon returning home. My first time reading his work but not my last.
Compressed reflective family grief poems. I heard Tyree Daye speak on the ekphrastic at AWP (check out his collages!) and I grabbed this book upon returning home. My first time reading his work but not my last.
May 28, 2021
A poignant praise of the Black experience, community, and connection to landscape, Tyree Daye’s second book is a beautiful follow up to River Hymns. The book illustrates a dexterity of language, form, precision, and use of space on the page—an all-around great collection.
December 23, 2022
Tyree Daye's collection is full of beautiful, sobering pieces. I'm glad to have read them. They can speak to anyone who has experienced prejudice, grief, heartache. I hope one day I can hear him read his poems aloud.
January 18, 2021
I liked the many references to North Carolina and extended family members. His verse is mostly accessible, too.
February 1, 2021
On growing up in the south; the birds flying about. Family coming and going. The ocean close and far.
March 18, 2021
Damn if he didn't do it again.
March 19, 2021
The inscrutable South...
March 30, 2024
made me feel like my heart was sculpted out of piedmont clay
December 30, 2024
I found myself crying in the middle of reading this. I was so moved by Daye’s writing and the poems were so evocative. Highly recommend
February 22, 2021
Definitely out of my personal experience and so worthwhile. Needed to read some sections more than once to understand. A soft, sad undertone in these poems.
July 16, 2021
Cardinal was a New Suns book for our January 2021: Journeys, Exodus box. Read the full review here!
"Tyree Daye’s stunning collection draws from Victor Hugo Green’s Green Book in creating a poetic guide through a landscape that is so deeply rooted in the blood of Black people that Daye finds himself carrying it in his veins wherever he goes. In addition to mapping the geographical South, Cardinal presents a topography of relationships, dirt roads winding and unfurling from Daye to his mother, to the bodies of his grandmother, uncle, and son. Interspersed between the poems are full-color family photographs, like landmarks of memory blurred by death and time...
These verses are full of echoes, a line in one poem reflected in the title of another, images of birds and fields and stars spanning the entire collection. Daye has a remarkable way of layering colors and symbols with meaning... Every time I reread a poem, I find new depths and connections I didn’t make before. These colors and images form constellations that lead you through the pages, in addition to the actual constellations in the first and last poem in the collection, which are drawn out with asterisks, chevrons, and lowercase 'i's.
What I love best about Cardinal is the nuance and complexity with which it questions Daye’s conflicting desire to both stay in the South and leave, from his complicated relationship to the home that both raised and wishes to kill him to reflections on how being Black in America means being unsafe in America ('I’ve never been through airport security / without being pulled to the side and searched / to know you can die anywhere / doesn’t feel like flying anywhere'). These remarkably tender verses are filled with love, grief, memory, and musicality: 'if you see me dancing a two-step / I’m sending a starless code / we’re escaping everywhere.'"
"Tyree Daye’s stunning collection draws from Victor Hugo Green’s Green Book in creating a poetic guide through a landscape that is so deeply rooted in the blood of Black people that Daye finds himself carrying it in his veins wherever he goes. In addition to mapping the geographical South, Cardinal presents a topography of relationships, dirt roads winding and unfurling from Daye to his mother, to the bodies of his grandmother, uncle, and son. Interspersed between the poems are full-color family photographs, like landmarks of memory blurred by death and time...
These verses are full of echoes, a line in one poem reflected in the title of another, images of birds and fields and stars spanning the entire collection. Daye has a remarkable way of layering colors and symbols with meaning... Every time I reread a poem, I find new depths and connections I didn’t make before. These colors and images form constellations that lead you through the pages, in addition to the actual constellations in the first and last poem in the collection, which are drawn out with asterisks, chevrons, and lowercase 'i's.
What I love best about Cardinal is the nuance and complexity with which it questions Daye’s conflicting desire to both stay in the South and leave, from his complicated relationship to the home that both raised and wishes to kill him to reflections on how being Black in America means being unsafe in America ('I’ve never been through airport security / without being pulled to the side and searched / to know you can die anywhere / doesn’t feel like flying anywhere'). These remarkably tender verses are filled with love, grief, memory, and musicality: 'if you see me dancing a two-step / I’m sending a starless code / we’re escaping everywhere.'"
May 22, 2022
Only thing better than reading Tyre’s work is hearing him read it.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews