Negro Mountain

“What do hills / summarize? Origin stories?” asks the speaker in C.S. Giscombe’s Negro Mountain, titled after the highest point in Pennsylvania, itself named—or rather unnamed—after a Black man killed in a battle between white settlers and Indigenous people. Like the man’s fate, his name on record was decided for him, as Giscombe notes in the book’s closing discursive “Notes on Region”:

history […] has preserved the particular Negro’s name as having been Nemises […] though it would seem unlikely that his parents called him that, it being more likely that he was, in some way, owned. Nemises or Nemesis is a mascot’s name, a pet’s name, the ironic name of an animal. A “name” for the primitive.

In “Camptown,” Giscombe gives “Nemises” voice to speak back to the textual record of himself: “In one passage I was colossal. / (Monstrous stays evil all day).” And “In another I was reliable. / Brother, who—in hell—walks?”

Giscombe has interrogated maps and borders—of geography, speaker, and genre—over a nearly 50-year career. In Negro Mountain, he continues the work of Giscome Road, using a reference point on a map as a catalyst for exploring historical erasures. The speakers and characters in Negro Mountain often move by train (just as Giscombe himself often writes on trains; see, among others, the collaborative Train Music) and cross boundaries through shapeshifting, or passing, as in “Seven Dreams”:

I was a woman in a prison camp, my job
was to work the yard. I walked away,
drifted north, like I do, and came to Canada; but by then I
     was
a man dressed in a long soviet coat, wool with a red collar.

The physical mutability of the speakers embody the textual slippage throughout. In “Overlapping Apexes (for Ed Roberson),” Giscombe engages not only with Roberson but also William Blake, both as poet and as engraver for John Stedman’s Revolted Negroes; the O.E.D; Rousseau; and more, including sampling a museum publication, “New Theories on the Ancient Maya,” by two white anthropologists: “‘The were-jaguar of the Olmecs . . . is a compound image with non-jaguar parts drawn from other life forms,’” before swerving to clarification: “Similarly, the wolves, the Negro ‘speaker,’ and the mountain are not one.” Giscombe’s brilliant cultivation of discovery through dismantling and collaging continues to vitalize hybrid and documentary poetics.