Barbara Berman Recommends Four New Poetry Books for The Rumpus
At The Rumpus, in keeping with yearly tradition, Barbara Berman has reviewed "four new collections of poetry and books on poetics that would be perfect for any reader on your holiday shopping list." This review will be her final one for the site, as she writes in a closing author's note. It's a good last hurrah: Berman has picked Little Black Train by Jordan Smith, The Voice of Sheila Chandra by Kazim Ali, Natch by Sophia Dahlin, and the poetic essay, French Guiana: Memory Traces from the Penal Colony (Wesleyan), by Patrick Chamoiseau, translated by Matt Reeck. From her review of the latter:
Poetry has many siblings, and as Claudia Rankine and others have shown so eloquently, photography is one of them. Translated by Matt Reeck, French Guiana: Memory Traces from the Penal Colony is a stunning, essential reissue of work by Patrick Chamoiseau, with photographs by Rodolphe Hammadi. The brisk introduction by Charles Forsdick notes that the French, like many of us in the dominant group of a colonialist culture, are professionals at forgetting the worst that our states have committed:
Our Monuments remain like suffering.
They bear witness to suffering.
They preserve suffering.This text faces a photograph of a small, battered cross, with a rusted neck lock and chain in the foreground. Two forms merge here with “prose” on the same page that lists, among other reminders of travesty, sugar cane slavery and military occupation.
Chamoiseau coins the phrase “the law of sedimentary memory,” an essential term that has contemporary resonance, especially when considered with the words that soon follow: “The prison at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. The walls there are pale, terrible, scarred by humidity.” This is impossible to separate from what is done to prisoners here in our own country and elsewhere.…
Read it all at The Rumpus.