cover image The Lazarus Poems

The Lazarus Poems

Kamau Brathwaite. Wesleyan Univ., $24.95 (100p) ISBN 978-0-8195-7687-3

Barbadian poet and scholar Brathwaite, winner of the Griffin Prize for Born to Slow Horses, considers approaching mortality in a vatic and valedictory mode while meditating on the natural world, specifically that of his native Caribbean. Brathwaite’s work here is jagged, politically engaged, and concerned with “cultural lynching.” Fragments of reportage, song, and dream abut slippery linguistic ruins in his trademark Sycorax video style, which features wildly varying layout and typography. Homonyms and double meanings abound, as in the figure of Namsetoura, a specter of an enslaved woman whose nickname of Namse (an anagram of names) is another word for the tricky shape-shifting deity Anansi. While the Middle Passage remains a touchstone for Brathwaite, here this concept merges with childbirth to consider the Biblical notion of resurrection with a cosmic unity that sees “my navel-string unravelling from underneath the banyan in the backyard to the stars.” Brathwaite’s less mystical moments, such as “Alice in Wonderland,” an elegy for Alice Coltrane, touch on time’s passage with moving and unadorned lyricism: “But while my heart was upside-down in air/ (not-knowing child. not time-// suspecting then).” Readers willing to penetrate typographical eccentricities and a collage of spiritual mythology will discover startling eco-social poetics informed by a surprisingly unsentimental eye that knows “love will have to return into this cool pool also.” (Oct.)