Book description
Kamau Brathwaite is a major Caribbean poet of his generation and one of
the major world poets of the second half of the twentieth century.
Elegguas--a play on "elegy" and "Eleggua," the
Yoruba deity of the threshold, doorway, and crossroad--is a collection
of poems for the departed. Modernist and post-modernist in inspiration,
Elegguas draws together traditions of speaking with the dead, from
Rilke's Duino Elegies to the Jamaican kumina practice of bringing down
spirits of the dead to briefly inhabit the bodies of the faithful, so
that the ancestors may provide spiritual assistance and advice to those
here on earth. The book is also profoundly political, including elegies
for assassinated revolutionaries like in the masterful "Poem for
Walter Rodney."
Throughout his poetry, Brathwaite foregrounds
"nation-language," that difference in syntax, in rhythm, and
timbre that is most closely allied to the African experience in the
Caribbean, using the computer to explore the graphic rendition of
nuances of language. Brathwaite experiments using his own Sycorax fonts,
as well as deliberate misspellings ("calibanisms") and
deviations in punctuation. But this is never simple surface aesthetic,
rather an expression of the turbulence (in history, in dream) depicted
in the poems. This collection is a stunning follow-up to Brathwaite's
Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan, 2005), winner of the Griffin
International Poetry Prize. "This collection is a wonderful
experience, highly recommended for both experienced and new Brathwaite
readers." --Elaine Savory, Review: Literature and Arts of the
Americas KAMAU BRATHWAITE, cofounder of the Caribbean Artists
Movement, is currently a professor of comparative literature at New York
University, and shares his time between his home in CowPastor, Barbados,
and New York City.
