Poetry – Novel Niche

A special, ultra-vibesy shout-out to Novel Niche’s official illustrator (and my dear friend), writer and artist Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, whose newly-commissioned artwork for NN filled me with a burst of creative zeal, inspiring me to relaunch this particular series. Thank you, Danielle! 🙂 *showers you with leaves*

Rosa, written by Nikki Giovanni, illustrated by Bryan Collier. Published in 2005 by Henry Holt and Company.

This story first came to me in my mid-twenties.

Rosa It’s December 1st, 1955. After a day of work at her seamstress’ job in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks boards a city bus from its hateful Coloureds entrance, and takes a seat in the vehicle’s neutral section, where both blacks and whites can sit. Looking forward to returning home and cooking her husband something special, Parks’ positive daydreaming is interrupted by the bus driver’s belligerent demands that she surrender her seat to a white passenger. As anyone with a smidgeon of knowledge on the African-American Civil Rights Movement will tell you, Rosa Parks refused – not with equal hostility, but with a calm, undaunted resolve that has etched her name into history books, monuments and national holidays. Giovanni’s faithful, poetic retelling of Parks’ story takes the reader onto that very bus, and beyond it, to the Montgomery Bus Boycott that her actions springboarded into life. It includes the nomination of Martin Luther King, Jr. as the official spokesperson for anti-segregation laws, sparking a nonviolent movement towards equality in the Constitution of the United States.

What enchanted me?

Rosa Parks’ story isn’t, or shouldn’t be, new to most adults with any cognizance of the struggle against segregation in the U.S., but it might be in danger of being forgotten, if the story ever ceases to be told. This feels like a difficult concept for me to swallow, but several conversations with young people have assured me, repeatedly, of how easy it is to forget — and I balk to think at all the truthful, useful things I myself have forgotten.

Giovanni frames this true encounter with racism’s snarling maw in a way that glides effortlessly off the page. She fills up the narrative with impressions of Rosa as she was: calm, grounded, honest about her motivations in refusing unfair treatment: not because she was physically tired, but because she was exhausted of being trampled by an unfair hierarchy. Books such as these are a boon to young readers, who interface with history’s heroines and heroes, as well as to the adults who read them aloud. For adults, they act as pillars of printed remembrance, of real stories that ought never be forgotten.

A 2006 Caldecott Honor Book, Rosa is beautifully illustrated in watercolour images and collage treatments by Bryan Collier, creating warm and immersive effects. His pictoral imaginings of the life that Parks led, up til and beyond her powerful act of resistance, complement Giovanni’s clear, strong prose. Collier received the 2006 Coretta Scott King Book Illustrator Award for his work in Rosa.

Lines for Life:

“She sighed as she realized she was tired. Not tired from work but tired of putting white people first. Tired of stepping off sidewalks to let white people pass, tired of eating at separate lunch counters and learning at separate schools. […] She thought about her mother and her grandmother and knew they would want her to be strong. She had not sought this moment, but she was ready for it.”

This book would be best-beloved by:

♣ An avid junior historian who’s curious about investigating the past, and not hesitant to name pioneers for social justice as her role models, in lieu of pop stars.

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Dark Emperor & Other Poems of the Night, written by Joyce Sidman, illustrated by Rick Allen. Published in 2010 by Houghton Mifflin Books for Children.

I was in my mid twenties when these poems fell into my palms.

This collection begins with a nocturnally winsome invocation, “Welcome to the Night”, in which these dark hours are described with as much liveliness and imaginative engagement as any merry daylight revel:

“The night’s a sea of dappled dark,
the night’s a feast of sound and spark,
the night’s a wild, enchanted park,
Welcome to the night!”

Subsequent poems are dedicated to specific woodland creatures: snails; moths; owls; trees; spiders; porcupettes; crickets; mushrooms; efts; bats, and the moon. Each poem reveals the ways in which these night companions investigate and explore their domain, during the hours between evening’s first footfall and the dawn’s pearly herald of a new day. For every poem, too, there is a column of accompanying factual text, detailing the physical properties, habits and characteristics of the poem’s subject.

What enchanted me?

A 2011 Newberry Honor Book, Dark Emperor is precisely the sort of children’s book that will be read to Baby/ies Novel Niche, should one/s ever be bouncily forthcoming. Barring that possibility, however, this remains a book for both treasuring closely and sharing widely, which is why I’ve two copies and plans to acquire more. Sidman’s poems are laden with the prancings, rustlings and winkings of these sylvan inhabitants, and each piece is a resonant embodiment of its focus. In “Dark Emperor”, from which the book derives its title, Sidman hones in unerringly on the great horned owl’s imperious majesty, wondering in verse at

“What symphonies of
squeaks and skitters, darts
and rustles, swell the vast,
breathing darkness of your realm?”

The owl as foreboding predator; the spider as confident peddler of survival instincts; the steadfast and nurturing guardianship of the oak tree: these character sketches and several others await the reader, bound to fascinate children with any love for the earth’s wild and unexplored places. The factual supplements will interest older children who are getting their hands and chemistry sets messy with documenting their environmental observations.

Rick Allen’s relief printed lino cuts are individual vistas of panoramic and precise astonishment, allowing a revisitation of familiar animals and haunts with eyes that will appreciate the artist’s intricacy, his use of shadow and light, his measured and brilliant application of pigment. Allen’s art holds hands eagerly and elegantly with Sidman’s, and the results are worth reading and rereading: they make the perfect invitation to a night-time slumber party of imaginative revels, beneath the glow of a moon waxing towards fullness.

Lines for Life:

“Where are the diving sweeps of the nighthawk
and where its haunting cry?
Where is the thrum of crickets,
the throbbing of frogs?
Where are the great flocks of travelers
whose soft wings whispered to me,
wave upon wave,
beating toward some distant wood?”

from “The Moon’s Lament” (an ubi sunt)

This book would be best-beloved by:

♣ A wee expeditioner with good, clean dirt beneath his fingernails, a magnifying glass hanging from a string ’round his neck, and a heart filled with investigative zeal that tracks muddy footprints right into the night forest’s teeming core.

Charting Children’s Literature is a monthly feature at Novel Niche that seeks to highlight the beauty and richness inherent in many of the books written and illustrated with the enjoyment and education of young children in mind. The feature was launched in August 2011, and is set to run for the foreseeable future (to infinity and beyond)!

If you’re interested in bringing to my attention beautiful children’s books I haven’t yet covered, feel free to leave a comment on this page. If you would like to contribute a guest Charting Children’s Literature feature, please make use of the contact form provided. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Published in 2011 by Peepal Tree Press.

Winner of the Poetry Category Prize, OCM Bocas 2012.

Shortlisted for the overall OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2012.

Shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, 2012.

We lead complex, beautiful, many-dimensioned relationships with the Caribbean islands we inhabit. They require different masks, evolving responses to unpredictable seasons: whether we luxuriate in the heated thrust of Carnival, or mourn our murderous headlines, we, people of these particular islands, contain multitudes. This is one of the many gracefully-articulated messages woven into the fabric of Loretta Collins Klobah’s poems. At their forefront gleams the titular persona, the twelve foot neon woman, a resistance heroine, a glorious Madonna for the 21^st century. She resonates with passion as much as she snarls in discontent, this unabashed Puertorriqueña, and in so doing she provides both anchor and platform for Klobah’s wondrously sung pieces.

Indeed, it is singing that comes first to mind as one allows this collection to simmer in the blood, registering the finely-wrought heat of its movements, the attention paid to dance and the rhythms many claim as indigenous to our shared shorelines. In “The BBC Does Bomba”, barrio children set themselves free to the persistent, encouraging tattoos pounded out on Modesto Cepeda’s barrel-drum, becoming receptacles of kinetic splendour.

“Girls raise the ruffled circle-skirt
to salute the drum, flick wrists
con fuerza until the butterfly skirts snap
por la derecha, por la izquierda,
the flower-print cotton
faldas swinging like machetes
over the harvest.”

Wrapped up in the flowing undulations of dances like these, the poet reminds us, are examinations that pierce, conducted by both foreign and local eyes. The question of perceptions, of how Puerto Rico and the wider Caribbean sees itself, how we are seen by others, runs through several of the poems, keenly felt in pieces such as “Googling the Caribbean Suburbs”. Here, the narrator conducts a search that zooms in on satellite images of her home from space, the rows of houses making up, in impersonal relief, the neighbourhood whose inhabitants she knows intimately, having shared her life in close communion with their own. “Google Earth makes us out as small, blurred spaces,” the penultimate line of the poem reports, closing with, “That’s how we look, from out there.”

Embedded in this discussion of how we see ourselves are uncompromising, angry refrains against the criminal violence exploding through Puerto Rican and all Caribbean streets. Klobah’s voice rings out against the censorship of police brutality, gang warfare, injustices against children. These poems do the opposite of presenting a unified touristic front: they impel in language that abjures the severity of academia for the warmth of the pueblo, for the anxious concerns of living, working, struggling Caribbean people. “We have created a new world where the indiscriminate gun is always at our backs,” laments the narrator, in “El Velorio, The Wake (1893)”, a poem that paints in vivid and excruciating detail the preparations for the funeral of a child killed by a stray bullet. Unforgettable images of sorrow in the wake of destruction accompany many of these examinings, in the shape of a halo of flies around a child’s head; of corpses that “lie in little beds of straw in the war zones”; of five young bodies tumbling off a fortress wall, “their surprised appendages flailing like starfish legs, turning like pinwheels.”

At the epicentre of all this, the soul’s purely decadent delight with its own rhythms is allowed to unfurl. Poems like “The First Day of Hurricane Season” possess this self-ownership without apology or shame, as its narrator, a woman in the full glow of her maturity, savours the taste of her life as it is now.

“I brew fresh ginger tea with coarse brown cane sugar,
cut a papaya, and watch the sun bead its juices.
No one ever taught me to expect that a phase of life
spent without a lover could be as happy, simple, and rich
as this.”

There is a way, too, that Nature reaches out to graze its fingertips against the wetness of human experience in the poet’s verse. The veil between what we fabricate for convenience, and what the land offers us for survival: this seems thinnest and most porous in pieces such as “Night Wash”, wherein a woman, post-washtub-rinsing, hears night beckoning her. “When one frog sings alone,” she listens, “it sounds like someone weeping, or hiccuping after the kind of hot-eyed, bottomless weeping that I have not had for a very long time.” Even amidst the uncertainty of violence, about which nothing is definite other than its eventuality, these poems are sheathed in sylvan hope. They can show you the way back to your own open heart, gently, with the grace of forests, bamboo cathedrals, singing frogs.

If we run the risk of becoming inured to daily senselessness, then Klobah’s poems pull us back from the brink of ennui, reminding us what fiery solace can live in raised arms of protest. There is a balance here of old worlds meeting new, of the slavery barracks colliding with street art, of our ancestors melding into the patterns of fierce pop and rap songs.

The twelve-foot woman herself, she who can claim many names in daylight or in darkness, holds this cultural syncretism proudly in the cradle of her belly. In the lushly-titled “The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman on Top of María’s Exotik Pleasure Palace Speaks of Papayas, Hurricanes, and Wakes”, she sways in her hard-won confidence. She has wrestled her autonomy from the clutches of slave owners and abusive lovers, from history’s cruelties and a nation’s difficult congress with itself. She channels “Oya, orisha of whirlwinds and cemeteries”, making no apologies for her pain, no reparations for her sweet, Boricua music, intent on “writing my son and daughter all my love songs,” a woman warrioress we both need and recognize triumphantly.

A marginally shorter version of this review first appeared in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on August 19th, 2012. You can view it here.