Sturge Town
Poems
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
In this stunning volume, acclaimed poet Kwame Dawes explores the mythic, ancestral, and spiritual journeys that make up a life.
The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes’s family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality, and engages in an intimate dialogue with the reader—serious, confessional, alarmed, and sometimes teasing. Metrically careful and sonorous, these poems engage in a personal dialogue with the reader, serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualized spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The contemplative latest from Dawes (Nebraska) surveys a series of comings and goings both personal and historical. Taking its title from one of the first free villages founded by formerly enslaved people in Jamaica, the collection explores departures and returns from a postcolonial perspective, reflecting on a lifetime of forging a self through poetry. "I built my own myth/ of departure," Dawes writes in the title poem as the speaker imagines visiting an abandoned family house in Jamaica that has fallen into ruin. "The Making of a Poet" ends on the lines "Call me a voyeur, call me a kind of slut,/ but I still carry the transgression of indulgent/ watching, spying, in the shelter of the night." Throughout, storytelling serves as a powerful tool to grapple with the impossibility of return. In a poem about a deceased sister, he again ponders this layered theme: "I live in another country. The place where her bones rest/ is nostalgic for me. For too long, I have not visited/ that sun-beaten patch of earth to stand mute,/ then speak for want of doing something better." Wise and generous, this illustrates a poetic journey toward self-understanding.
