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A review of Gold Indigoes
(Carolina Wren Press, USA, 2010)
ISBN 0-9321112-40-4
by George Elliot Clarke
"Export Gold?"
NB Earlier article here
As referenced in the earlier post, The Leonard Cohen comparison is strongest in George Elliot Clarke's poem, Naima, with a nod to Cohen's most famous song, Suzanne:
Naima I should perfume my letters,
confuse spices with my ink,
spirit tea from orange peels and sugar....
...
I know the lime or vinegar taste
of leaves in rain,
but I crave the criminal flavour of red
wine sick with magenta lipstick.
...
Our poetry will close
either in flames or flowers.
In 'Nietzsche' there is a return to the constant undercurrent of vice and sin, which is prevalent in the new work.
"A world of good," they
insisted, "it would do me
to try the brothel."
I was not exactly expecting this, as I am not a great GEC scholar or any great scholar in general and perhaps was expecting more a cacophony of words, as I had heard at the reading at U of T all those nights before but the distillation of themes of love, sex, regret and carnal passions are all carefully placed, each poem its own entity, its own statement. There is a deftness of touch, less of a tendency to show off here:
In Au Moment the familiar cold French streets present this arresting image:
"Six days to go, six days too long.
Snow is fainting in the streets.
My money is unhappy, love,
and all the beds are hard."
As Clarke is an Africadian poet, with an eye for the local Nova Scotian sensibility imbued with a history of intolerance, shame, neglect and racial undertones his strongest work in this collection must be:
September 17, 1977
Dissolving, I am dissolving under
Persevering cold and severing rain
A bit of winter in that bitter wet
Guillotining us like a death sentence
The North Street Church steps spumed up frost, waiting.
As clouds and she stormed colder and later:
Her gold hair delayed even rain-weighted.
Standing stuttered by chills at chasms edge.
I was not quite, not quite, understanding
Her Irish name fronting an Acadie
History who she really was, I knew
No history about Evangeline
Or Eve, only that she was departing.
Deporting me from her occupied heart.
So? So what you might ask? I guess it is like this. When I read the words, I hear the voice. And the voice takes me back to that place that I come from, the people, the cadence of speaking, the rhythm. And those are the things that carry us through out lives: the memories that we have when we are old of when we were young. I can see George Elliot Clarke saying this poem. I can hear him reading it too. It stays with me. Imagine the struggle that he must deal with, that all poets must deal with. If you can get a person to read a poem, even? And get them to say it – and remember it? Well then, then you have really accomplished something haven't you? This is part of a larger work evidently. And even though I didn't know it, I have been following his work for nearly twenty years.
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