More Than Meat and Raiment
In More Than Meat and Raiment, Angela Jackson speaks with the authority of a modern American griot as she searches beyond our physical realm for what we might cling to after death. Will love or memory sustain when “[w]e cannot record the empty parts of ourselves / [w]here memories never were”? Through three sections that could stand alone as separate collections, Jackson explores this question from a multitude of angles.
The poems collected in “Hero-House,” the first section, trace a Great Migration narrative from Mississippi to Chicago, with echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks. In one poem, twelve stacked haikus bounce back and forth across the page. Elsewhere, Jackson makes use of the sonnet, sestina, and other forms, utilizing repetition to highlight memory’s circular structure. The magic of the image is turned up in “The Flowering Bamboo”:
Blossoming complex necessity,
Cornrows over my wondering brain. Dreaming.
The second section, “Wishbone Wish (An African-Americanized Folktale),” includes fifty-four poems that use the scaffolding of Hausa folklore to craft an extended narrative that explores the death and resurrection of lost children. The tale is punctuated by a dark chorus attributed to birds:
You can’t cure everything.
You can’t cure everything.
“Soul World,” the book’s final section, reflects on more recent history, with references to Boko Haram, the COVID-19 pandemic, and police violence. In “The Red Record,” a long, grief-laden poem cataloging—but not naming—Black lives snuffed out by police murders, the reader is asked to fill in the list of names, until
I break the record. The names too
Multitudinous to list. I break
The record listing obliteration
Of Black presence, élan, beingness.
I cannot keep count.
Though shot through with elegy, Jackson’s voice celebrates a Black community well versed in holding space for contradiction: “let our people be the people who remember and believe that love is all our portions […] holding on and lifting this earth, our house, precious and precarious.”