Book Information

Publisher

Louisiana State Univ Pr

Published

1997-11-01

Pages

144 pages

Language

英語

Size

13.97 x 0.76 x 22.86 cm

ISBN-13

9780807121986

ISBN-10

0807121983

Price

4216 JPY

Category

洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American

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. We hear Juan San Malo, leader of a slave rebellion; Luis Congo, a free Kongo man; myriad brothers and sisters, both distinct and collective; and the city itself, “thrumming / eternal / ever / at the tracks.” 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.”

Brenda Marie Osbey, a native New Orleanian, is a poet and essayist working in English and French, and is Poet Laureate Emerita of Louisiana. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, including All Souls: Essential Poems. Brenda Marie Osbey lives in New Orleans and has published three previous volumes of poetry, Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman; In These Houses; and Ceremony for Minneconjoux. She is Poet Laureate of Louisiana. For more information on the author, please visit her website: http://www.osbey.com/

Related Literary Awards

• American Book Awards Edition 19 (1998) ・Winner