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Title: The Venus Hottentot (Callaloo Poetry Series, Vol 9) by Elizabeth Alexander ISBN: 0-8139-1273-3 Publisher: Univ of Virginia Pr Pub. Date: 01 March, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: rescripting the venus
Comment: The book, the Venus Hottentot, by Elizabeth Alexander, is a powerful conflation of what it means to be an african-american woman artist in a space that is dominated by the aestheticized science of the white male patriarchy. Within her writing, Alexander combines beautiful imagery with potent politics. Much of Alexander's poetry involves a renaming. The poems titled with names involve an elaboration of those names into a series of images, a collage of interconnected senses, places and objects. The poet's active role as historian reawakens the components of history, allowing them to shape and be shaped by the poetic encounter. Through the restructuring of names within history, Alexander renames herself. History becomes a menagerie of colors rather than the juxtaposition of black lettering on blank paper, making her poetry a sensual compilation of rhythms, colors and rescripted historical themes.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Terrible Beauty
Comment: "All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born." --W.B. Yeats, "Easter 1916"
"a terrible beau- ty a terrible beauty a terrible beauty a horn" --Elizabeth Alexander, "John Col"
The parallel of Ireland's War for Independence to John Coltrane's jazz at first may strike some readers as a stretch. However, through the pen of Elizabeth Alexander, an African-American poet who manages to discuss at once important issues of race and myriad topics within history, art and music, any connection is elucidated with eloquence and power. In "The Venus Hottentot," Alexander's first book of poems, the subjects range from personal memory to entire cultural memories to human subjects: John Coltrane, Romare Bearden, Claude Monet, a rare black cowboy. In the fourth section of her book, Alexander's essential message is one of unity in difference. "I could go to any city/ and write a poem" she states in "Miami Footnote." And she does, writing out of Boston, Philadelphia, Brooklyn. Her subjects are black, Hispanic, and the eye with which she paints them has its own form of the Monet's xanthopsia in "Monet at Giverny." Colors fade from the black and vivid blue of Bearden's collages into "yellow freesia," "red notes." In "Today's News", she states that "blackness is" is a poem she does not want to write, because "we are not one or ten or ten thousand things." The reader stands looking up and around at the montage, a Diego Rivera mural surrounding one with "walls and walls of scenes of work." The "Painting" is effusive, so why not include the Irish? Out of the clashes of culture, the curious, though ignorant, manipulation of a race in "The Venus Hottentot," a "terrible beauty is born." Alexander sees this beauty in all its colors and musical shadings, none of which alone can describe a situation. Shading her vision with Irish green or Monet's blue, she lives true to the words of "Today's News": "Elizabeth,/ this is your life. Get up and look for color,/ look for color everywhere." Perceptive readers would do well to join Alexander in her search; they just might find something unexpected and lovely.
Rating: 5
Summary: kinetic poetry
Comment: If you're looking for an energetic, political, feminist poet who calls it like it is - you've got to read this book. It is beautifully provocative, and tightly written - very exciting stuff.
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Title: Hottentot Venus: A Novel by Barbara Chase-Riboud ISBN: 0385508565 Publisher: Doubleday Books Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Black Interior by Elizabeth Alexander ISBN: 1555973930 Publisher: Graywolf Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Love by TONI MORRISON ISBN: 0375409440 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 28 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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