When Thy King Is A Boy

by Ed Roberson

C.D. Wright has described Roberson’s work as “lyric poetry of meticulous design and lasting emotional significance," comparing its musical qualities to the work of saxophonist Steve Lacy, jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Charles 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).

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Some of the young men have become aware of the Indian," George Oppen wrote in "A Narrative," right about the time these Ed Roberson poems were being written, and in the late Sixties, Roberson travelled -- inspired, no doubt, by Margot Astrov's great anthology of Native American poetry and prose, The Winged Serpent -- to Tsegihi, in New Mexico, to write about and become aware of the House Made of Dawn. In an interview, Roberson describes the period this way:

"That was right after my first book. My friends put together my first book, I didn't. I had always been writing poetry. We'd been having a good time passing them around and meeting girls in bars who were interested in us when they found out we wrote poetry . . . I was young, okay, and having fun. I didn't have any teachers. I had one professor, Dr. Charles Crow, who really took me under his wing and made me read Wallace Stevens and other modern poets. At that time, I was playing with poetry. No idea that anything would come of it. My friends put together the first book and entered into the Pitt Poetry Series. And it came out okay. Then Andy Welsh and Dick Randall and I, we decided to take this trip. Andy was doing a dissertation on the roots of lyric. So he was reading charms, power songs, healing songs. And I read a lot of anthropology, a lot of things about tribal and ethnographic material."

The poems in Roberson's first book, written in his twenties, when he was among other things working in a zoo, have the mark of that play he cops to here, they are playful, experimental, they are in the period style -- the jargon of sincerity -- and they are perhaps more instrumental than they need to be. "In these explanations," Oppen wrote in Of Being Numerous, "it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world," and that is what I find in Roberson's first book, keenly, cryptically so.