Sturge Town: Poems
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Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
“A richly intelligent, deeply descriptive exploration of home and identity.” —Fiona Sampson, Guardian
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.
Praise for Sturge Town: Poems
Kwame Dawes is an exquisite poet, a profound poet, a quiet poet, a great poet.
— Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other
Every poem in this collection seems to be the best of what it tries to be, whether an observation, anthropological recovery, ode, elegy, or even an ars poetica.… [T]he eighty-six poems here demonstrate a full, masterful command of his art.
— Scott LaMascus - World Literature Today
Like one of his heroes, Bob Marley, Dawes changes not just the way readers look at the world but the lens through which they see reality. His is a transcendent vision, filled with tenderness, curiosity, and compassion for what has been and what might be.
— Library Journal, starred review
Wise and generous, this illustrates a poetic journey toward self-understanding.
— Publishers Weekly
