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Just In: Word of Navigational Challenges: New and Selected Work
Poetry. African American Studies. Michael Palmer writes, "Ed Roberson offers us, up front, the nerve-edge of poetic speech, sequences of the unanticipated, as poetry of real significance is meant to do. This generous and much-needed selection graphs the development of a poet committed to the articulation of a resistant, multi-faceted identity. It should affirm his place, at last, as one of the most deeply innovative and critically acute voices of our time." JUST IN: WORD OF NAVIGATIONAL CHALLENGES is a chronicle of Roberson's works from 1970 to the present, marked throughout by a language derived from the rhythms of speech and the natural world: see in the river the ripples' / picture on the surface of the wind the lifting of the image / has taken at the deeper face // the starry freedom / written in the milky rivery line... (Taking the Print).
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
7 people want to read
About the author
Ed Roberson
25 books14 followersCharles Edwin (Ed) Roberson is a distinguished American poet, celebrated for his unique diction and intricacy in exploring the natural and cultural worlds. His poetic voice is informed by a background in science and visual art, coupled with his identity as an African American. Roberson has been an active poet since the early 1960s and has authored eight collections, including "Atmosphere Conditions" (1999) and "City Eclogue" (2006). Among his many honors are the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award (1998) and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award (2008).
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 5, 2023
from 'song' (p16)
i know the wood simply
the tree is a wreck of the ash of the watchfire
what i know that is not a stranger
was never in the mind of order. of the woods.
**
from 'V. Properties' (p93)
Black with the road's dusts,
the atmosphere, solid, on the ground
turns into a pool, the
ground's mirror,
and picks up the sky again.
**
from 'jacket' (p28)
Many of these poems attempt to make happen to words that which happens to lines in an optical illusion. Many of these poems have that kind of architecture of things which live in the sea. They are built without a base, beginning above the ordinary ground of the mind and ending there in illusion. Yet they are not illusions. They are real: because the poetic of all our languages has the more potential for concretion. It can be said that either these poems recognize their suspension so clearly, concretize their suspension so clearly, or from their suspension recognize their ground so clearly that the glare (regularity/clarity) of that vision has created a solid about itself such that chaos is the only ground.
i know the wood simply
the tree is a wreck of the ash of the watchfire
what i know that is not a stranger
was never in the mind of order. of the woods.
**
from 'V. Properties' (p93)
Black with the road's dusts,
the atmosphere, solid, on the ground
turns into a pool, the
ground's mirror,
and picks up the sky again.
**
from 'jacket' (p28)
Many of these poems attempt to make happen to words that which happens to lines in an optical illusion. Many of these poems have that kind of architecture of things which live in the sea. They are built without a base, beginning above the ordinary ground of the mind and ending there in illusion. Yet they are not illusions. They are real: because the poetic of all our languages has the more potential for concretion. It can be said that either these poems recognize their suspension so clearly, concretize their suspension so clearly, or from their suspension recognize their ground so clearly that the glare (regularity/clarity) of that vision has created a solid about itself such that chaos is the only ground.
Displaying 1 of 1 review