Refractive Africa
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Publisher Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the California Book Award in Poetry
Three kinetically distilled long poems by the singular American poet who “transfigures ‘thought’ into a weave of lexical magic” (Philip Lamantia)
“The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. “This being the ballet of the forgotten,” he writes as diasporic witness, “of refracted boundary points as venom.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo—two writers whose luminous art suffered “colonial wrath through refraction.” A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as “charged aural colony” and “primal interconnection,” a “subliminal psychic force” with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander’s improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance—incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest from Alexander (The Sri Lankan Loxodrome) excavates a pan-African literary perspective in poems of celebration and defiance. Two of Alexander's poems honor his African literary idols: "Based on the Bush of Ghosts" refers to the work of Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola, who Alexander venerates as one who "charted the dead as a perfect stenographer of ruin." Similarly, in the poem "Eruption from the Compound of Living," Alexander praises the Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo as a writer who "enunciated grace/ via endemic lingual styling" and whose work "continues to mine nutrients from interstellar rotation." For Alexander, these writers illustrate an unapologetically African approach to language, emphasizing local vernaculars and traditions. Sandwiched between these poems is another long poem titled "The Congo," in which the speaker takes on the persona of a "psychophysical" African healer surveying the historical exploitation of the central African country while envisioning the Congo as cradle of existence itself: "from this height/ I see the Congo as proto-condensation/ prior to incarcerated mass/ being precelestial in nature/ as sporulation from the cosmos." Densely lyrical, Alexander's expansive poetry captures the psychic toll of colonial barbarity while suggesting the possibility of spiritual renewal and transcendence.
