All Saints: New and Selected Poems |  | Author: Brenda Marie Osbey
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Category: Book
Buy New: $90.93
as of 2/9/2012 08:01 PST details
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Languages: English (Unknown), English (Original Language), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 128
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.9 x 0.7
ISBN: 0807121975
EAN: 9780807121979
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Product Description
Like the feast day recalled in its title, this collection of twenty narrative poems venerates the dead. Brenda Marie Osbey invokes, impersonates, and converses with her Afro-New Orleans forebears--both blood ancestors and spiritual predecessors--weaving in hypnotic cadence a spell as potent as the religious and magical mysteries of her native culture. In All Saints we come to believe the dead do live, in the slave bricks paving the city's faubourgs, in the Hoodoo rites and images of saints, and especially in ourselves, who "walk upon the earth a living man / wearing all the shrouds of mourning like a skin / and memory like a stone inside your organs." Assisted by a glossary of New Orleans ethnic expressions, place names, and characters, we discern in these poems a multitude of voices that speak to us from colonial times forward. Chanting, lamenting, outpouring, healing--Osbey's poems measure her own musical refrain to the past while keeping time with the present: "we cry out together / in time to hear their cries."
Amazon.com Review
"you might say i have / this peculiar fascination / with the dead," admits Brenda Marie Osbey in All Saints, her American Book Award-winning collection of poems. As a New Orleans native speaking through historical Creole characters, she celebrates the ways the dead maintain a living presence in New Orleans, whether in their above-ground tombs, in religious hoodoo ancestor worship, or in bricks from an old slave factory in the Treme fauborg--a New Orleans usage for "neighborhood," as Osbey's extensive glossary explains. The glossary, like Eliot's notes on "The Wasteland," stands as an interesting document itself; using it isn't necessary to understand the poem, however. Spoken by characters from throughout New Orleans history, the poems understandably vary in tone and appeal. Osbey's style is accessible. Idiosyncrasies such as the absence of capital letters fade into the background once a reader tunes in to the poems' compelling dramatic situations: a desperate dialogue with Coffin Street's prophetic Mother Catherine, a prayer from San Malo for his maroon colony, an heartfelt open letter about the evening news to singer Nina Simone. Like Jonathan Swift's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" and other formal verse satires, Osbey's poems stack their grievances and observations on top of each other until, near the end, the tone breaks and she utters terribly moving truths--"the night is a bastard gleaming"--before cooling down. Osbey's book details family relationships, community life, and the struggle for redemption. This struggle is laid bare in "The Head of Luis Congo," a sequential poem about the beheading of Congo, a free black man hired in 1726 as keeper of the road along Bayou St. John, a route favored by escaping slaves. The poem's interplay between confession and braggadocio is a testament to Osbey's skill as a storyteller; the reader damns and pities Congo simultaneously. The book's title refers to the New Orleans custom of whitewashing tombs on All Saints' Day, and at her best, Osbey gives us a chance to observe how life and death intertwine. --Edward Skoog
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