Book reviewers are passionate about their opinions, which become convictions when fused to the stories of their lives. And since all writing is editing, a memoir lurks within each book review, ideally edited with such deliberation that only relevant story fragments make it into discussion of a creative work.
My conscious relationship with poetry began with my grandfather, who taught high school English and loved the music of the poems he was taught, and the poems he sought. This relationship continues with gluttonous, usually joyous reading increasingly connected to political understanding of my own history. This is why I cannot discuss the beautiful, fiery collection by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers without disclosing the fact that my olive-skinned father was asked to leave a bar in Columbia, South Carolina, learning later that the Jewish owners were under pressure from the Ku Klux Klan.
It was September in the 1930’s, and he had spent most of the summer as a night clerk at a relative’s hotel. When his shift ended he slept on the beach and got very dark. This was a story I heard often, and helps explain why when I read Jeffers’ essay and poetry in Black Nature—Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry, I was fed as much by her prose demand to “look at what remains, not what’s been taken,” as I was by her poetry.
Jeffers has mastered her awareness of the personal and the political/historical, and what must be named even as it can never be wholly comprehended. “Portrait d’une Negresse –after a painting by Marie – Guilhemine Benoist, oil on canvas c.1800” illustrates what I have just said:
I think,
I should emulate you : a pretty
bare breast suckling
Enlightenment,
a quiet object,
subject of a logic’s time .
I want,
need to understand the tension
between fancy and pain,
but no one tells me
who captured
the aftermath,
how you went from
beloved to body:
a la Negresse—
face down, rump up,
free woman
remastered. When I see
your wrapped head,
gaze tentative, careful with your
remaindered modesty—
ma chére,
I wonder where your mama is,
is she aware of this
moment? Would she
snatch you from
this pose
or push you to take bits
of sublime? Wherever
she is—
with you or across the water-
I’ve given
her the least I can.
Bewilderment. Reason.
I’m tired of beauty now,
these typical acts of light.
We can begin with staggering associations, to the Enlightenment and the men who led it, not to mention that the proper noun itself suggests the opposite of black. We can continue with the bare breasted reminder that many enslaved black women suckled children whose fathers were white rapists. Some of these women also suckled white children whose mothers were weak, ill or uninterested, depriving their enslaved infants of nourishment.
We can note the words “across the water,” with their King James Bible resonance, and how that Bible was used to oppress, even as its diction fed the greatness of countless writers of all colors, whether or not they were inspired by the faith it proclaimed, recognized the savagery it often supported, or had other complex responses to it. There’s a book in this poem, and I stop here, in a sketchy first chapter, urging readers to speak its words, to inhabit questions it raises about women and the people who categorize them. The page contains flawless pauses, blazing sighs and sounds.
It is a welcome lack of surprise to encounter an epigraph by Zora Neale Hurston just before the beginning of “birthright,” in which Jeffers addresses confusion and rage with similar skill :
Daily you will scratch for real meaning
in constant death and sundry nonsense
but no meaning will take place-damn it.
You might give in and commence to pray
and God might visit and drink your tea,
but The Holy One won’t stay for long.
This is a fragment of a whole that is full of hard-won succor, especially in the final lines :
You will grow wise : your mother was born
only the day before you were born-
and no woman ever really dies.
You will thank her for her cooking pot-
gratitude, another betrayal.
To face what she says requires artistic and emotional adulthood, which is always on display in The Glory Gets. It is a huge part of its strength, and I hope this sample from “If Free, Then” makes the point as well as everything else I have quoted.
1.
A woman is a bird:
Birdy Black.
A parched being
against sky and earth.
2.
Birdy rises early
with no consolation.
Not even a measly worm.
3.
The swelled knuckles
of Birdy’s hands.
This time, arthritis.
Next, Child
you better move.
4.
Once, Birdy thought
she might fly back
over the water.
She discovered no
translation for wings.
Jeffers could have said much to make it trite here, proving again that her inner editor knows what it is doing. Away from fine poetry like this we are surrounded and sometimes numbed by hackneyed repetitions Here instead we keep engaging with original, impeccable pause. Not a comma is out of place, and if you think of what birthed this creation, think also of Edna St Vincent Millay in The Indigo Bunting, losing sleep over punctuation. It’s what poets do, to make each composition sound inevitable.
The poem concludes the book with a thirteenth stanza :
Soon one morning-
Song done,
and here morning be.
Birdy in the wind.
“Joy cometh in the morning,” the Bible tells us, a line that’s been carved into American religious and secular memory. It is fittingly easy to spot hymnody in The Glory Gets, and it is worth noting that Jeffers credits God and ancestors among her friends in the acknowledgements. This is a book where liturgy and poetry meet in the gracious, magnificent wind. Believe what Jeffers says, even if you don’t think you have found “God’s grandeur,” as Hopkins put it. As Jeffers knows it.
