Console
Poems
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The second collection by "one of the most significant literary figures in the Caribbean" (The Globe and Mail).
Assured but chance-inflected, ever rooted in the local but always world-aware, Console reconsiders languages, geographies, and memories as luminous soundscapes. With lyric dexterity, Colin Channer jolts old notions of New England, cross-fading from the Berkshires to Anguilla, from Connecticut to Senegal. A dissolve to the poet’s childhood in Jamaica occurs after glimpsing an old record player in Providence, leading to the title poem’s meditations on reggae, religion, marriage, justice, and transgressions in the home.
With allusive links to photography, music, sea mammals, mistranslation, and the universal ritual of “the walk,” Console reorganizes our sense of time, collapses and rebreaks the remembered and certain, renames the familiar, reaches for settled etymologies, and turns words inside out.
Includes 8 black-and-white photographs
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exuberant volume, Channer (Providential) blends haunting lyricism, photography, and Jamaican patois into a potent combination that captures the geography of memory from the Caribbean to Senegal to New England. Dub—the electronic music that remixes existing tracks by layering effects to create new sounds—is a fitting inspiration for poems that find echoes in the ruins of the past as they reverberate in the present. Sensory details startle with their physicality and immediacy: "smells douse: old damp,/ goat fur, guano, bats. The roof holes// mate the algae puddles; loss amalgamated/ has clung." Contrasting life in Jamaica with New England, Channer writes: "To be black where/ I live now is to bivouac. White is wilderness in all seasons." A section titled "Hurricane Suite" alternates between poems and archival photographs of flooding in Providence, R.I., posing provocative questions about how and what is remembered: "the willed-to-be-forgotten pitch of English/ waffled by our great-grands, tongues flecked with/ known shame-bearing words, argots of bias,/ blessings, caste worship—chant, spell, hex." These intricate poems render the depths of memory in refreshingly original language.
