Sturge Town: Poems - Hardcover

by Kwame Dawes (Author)

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.

From "Recall"

Oh, pipe me back to my familiar earth,

for it is slipping slowly from me.

Back Jacket

Praise for Sturge Town

"Sturge Town is named for one of the earliest free villages in Jamaica, Dawes's family home. From this psychogeographic starting point . . . unspools a richly intelligent, deeply descriptive exploration of home and identity. . . . This personal odyssey becomes a universal journey."
-- Fiona Sampson, The Guardian

"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. . . . This verse collection is the twenty-first for Dawes, and the eighty-six poems here demonstrate a full, masterful command of his art."
-- Scott LaMascus, World Literature Today

"Kwame Dawes is an exquisite poet, a profound poet, a quiet poet, a great poet."
-- Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other

Praise for Kwame Dawes

"Dawes's verse has an expressive power and lyric resonance that can be attributed to a transatlantic consciousness weaned on the spiritual sources of reggae."
-- Major Jackson, New York Times Book Review

"Dawes elides the role of the midwestern pastoral poet as chronicler of idylls and instead positions himself as an equally valuable chronicler of sorrows . . . creating space for new voices to be heard."
-- Luke Hollis, Harvard Review

"[Kwame Dawes's] voice . . . is crystal clear, accessible and serious, mixing a timeless myth-making energy with a strong contemporary conscience."
-- NPR