Throughout, the poems also reflect the music of Reeves’ generation, in lyrics (above) from Outkast and other references (for example, one in “Without the Pelt of a Lion” in which Beyoncé takes the place of Homer’s Muse: “sing Beyoncé, of the burning / Heaven, and hurricanes and the little graves / That rise after, and the big graves” - that evokes her song “Formation”). Waking up slamming Cadillac doors OutkastĪnd out of gas the empire smiles in its guillotineĪs if to say ‘I practice the abundance of zero’įormally, the notes he hits draw from an ecstatic (in the religious sense) and prophetic line traced back to Hopkins and Whitman, reliant on alliteration and tonal inflection, and recall the intimate eloquence of James Baldwin who makes cameo appearances in several poems. That anything can be said about me and you
In a complicated poetry that contends with racism, myth, and the current moment, Reeves’ lines are infused with cadences that range from hip hop to the biblical, into a register all his own:Īs in everywhere the bucks went clatteringĪs in form forgets fugitivity is the original humanįorm as in best put on your best barbarian If Black Americans have equaled barbarian throughout the history of the American nation, Reeves seems to say, let them be other - named, claimed, and shown plainly in this 21 st century.
Here we find the best barbarian given voice, heart, aura.
To grapple with the history of Black America, Roger Reeves, in his second collection of poems, Best Barbarian, recasts traditional (whitewashed) American history and the literature of Harold Bloom’s Western Canon, retelling stories from perspective of the Other, the barbarian, returning the word to its simpler definition (“a person from an alien land, culture, or group believed to be inferior, uncivilized, or violent”) while amplifying its accumulated connotations.
0 kommentar(er)
