I & I

by George Elliott Clarke, Lateef Martin (Illustrator)

Shortlisted, Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry and Dartmouth Book Award In the "Boogie Nights" era of the 1970s, Betty Browning and her lover, boxer Malcolm Miles, travel from the fog-anchored grime of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to sunburnt Corpus Christi, Texas, and back — meeting tragedy and bloodshed along the way. I & I smoulders with love, lust, violence, and the excruciating repercussions of racism, sexism, and disgust. Rastafarian for "you and me," "I & I" expresses the oneness of God and man, the oneness of two people or the distinction between body and spirit. In George Elliott Clarke's hands, this existential aesthetic crystallizes in a love story of Gothic grit. The narrative gives this verse novel shape; the poetry makes it sing, straddling folk ballad, soul, and pop music, all the while moaning the blues.

Genres: Poetry

231 pages, Paperback

Published January 30, 2009

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

[Jane · Rating 1 out of 5]

I do not even know what to say about this book. It was supposed to be a book of poetry for our book group in honour of National Poetry Month. But it was actually one long poem, telling a story. It was an okay story but I didn’t like the poetry. Thankfully it was at least an easy read, so I didn’t have to put up with it for long.

[EIJANDOLUM · Rating 4 out of 5]

The scent of love perfumes the bitter wind:
It's a burnt-flesh smell – the aroma of lynching.

[Rusty · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there is a spectrum between poetry and prose... with poetry on one end beign discrete pieces of words on varying themes and prose on the other end being novel length stories... George Elliott Clarke moves around on that spectrum mroe than any other writer I have encountered.

I & I is a series of poems that tells a single story... kind of.

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a little bit of a struggle to rate. Plot-wise there were no surprises, although I don't know how well the format would work for something more complicated, so that's probably fine. Sometimes it just felt like it was trying too hard, but there were enough instances of completely gorgeous language that in the end, I'm still glad I read it.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really impressive poem that kinda fails as a novel. Not that it's a bad story, but it's one that everyone who's seen movies like Badlands or Bonnie and Clyde already knows. Rather unoriginal.

But that doesn't stop me from wanting to read the rest of this man's work. He can sure as hell write.