Brathwaite's elegguas

New from Wesleyan University Press is this latest volume of poetry by Kamau Brathwaite.

The book is structured around letters to his late wife which first appeared in different form in the book The Zea Mexican Diary (published by Wisconsin in '93). Those letters begin and end the new book, and there is one about a third of the way into the text. This is a fitting structure for a book of elegies that also summons the Yoruba Eleggua, generally encountered in doorways and at crossroads.

The poems are presented in Brathwaite's Sycorax video text and all the usual wordplay is on display. So, for example:

Let me hear it one more time

for

IVIE

ANDERSONNNG

&

DC

in summer

hot almost too simmer to sip. sop sit out on the stoep

with old men. cymbell children

cries rising like these northern egrets

above the railway tracks

where Sonny Greer come walk

ing down the sidewalk clickin sticks

.