Kwame Dawes Livres

The collection features four thematic sections that delve into the poet's family dynamics, particularly the complex triangular relationship with his father and younger brother. It explores the family's mythology, the hopes placed on his brother, and the tragic consequences of his brother's mental decline, which contributed to their father's early death. The poems convey the poet's journey to reconnect with his brother, capturing the intensity and eloquence of their shared experiences and the emotional landscape of their lives.

Focusing on the enduring impact of transatlantic slavery, the poems reflect a deep emotional spectrum, encompassing lamentation, anger, and celebration of resilience. Kwame Dawes captures individual moments from this historical atrocity, providing both a poignant reminder and a pathway to healing. His lyricism avoids sentimentality and instead confronts the harsh realities of the past while addressing their ongoing relevance. Through this unique approach, the work offers fresh insights into a subject that remains crucial to understanding contemporary society.

Exploring the intersections of politics, natural disasters, and social upheaval, this collection of lyric poems delves into the complexities of the modern world. Kwame Dawes captures diverse voices, from a Lockerbie attack survivor to a Rastafarian in Ethiopia, reflecting on themes of grace, loss, and faith. The poems are enriched by cultural references, including the prophet Ezekiel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Notably, a series pays tribute to the Haitian people post-earthquake, culminating in a return to the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, where Dawes' poetic journey began.

The first book ever to look in-depth at reggae as an artistic form, Natural Mysticism shows how reggae combines politics, sex, spirituality and art, and offers in depth analyzes of leading reggae artists such as Burning Spear, Lee Scratch Perry and Bob Marley.

Frank and earnest, this moving collection of poetry offers a glimpse into the support centers and hospice outside of Montego Bay and the many lives that have been lost to HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Culled from open dialogue with sufferers and those who care for them, and coupled with evocative photographs, AIDS becomes a channel for universal dramas, archetypal voices, stoicism, despair, and deeply human deceptions. Full of memories of a time when diagnosis was equivalent to a death sentence, each piece brings the lives of the indiscriminant victims to the forefront and battles the notion that this can only happen to others.

When Speak from Here to There was published in 2016 it was, remarkably, doing something quite new. There are of course the conversations implied in the poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth, but no two poets had committed to, in the words of Will Harris, the almost daily “structure of call-and-response, each utterance is filtered through the other.”This richly multi-layered dialogue arises from responses to each poet’s public world, to the private worlds of family, to the inner world of wondering how one can write “love poems in a time of war, these times of monstrous beasts,” and from the stimulus of the other’s poem arriving in the e-mail in-tray. Though both poets express their anxieties about the limitations of the prophetic, there is the countervailing witness of their immensely fertile imaginative response to each other’s words and the comfort that “On the road, you long for the like-minded” is a longing that is being fulfilled.

Increasingly recognized as a poet of both the Caribbean and of the United States, especially for his "Midland," which won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Selected Poems contains a generous selection from all six volumes of Dawes's poetry, showing the breadth and depth of his achievement. From writing the poems of displacement and loss of "Resisting the Anomie," the vibrant, unstoppable narratives of "Prophets" or "Jacko Jacobus," the concentrated poems of "Requiem" ("shrines of remembrance" for the millions of victims of transatlantic slavery), to the autobiographical poems of "Progeny of Air" and the questioning psalms and reggae poetry of "Shook Foil," Kwame Dawes's poetry has a unique, signal voice.

The third in a quartet of poem-dialogues between Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella, begun in 2015 with the critically acclaimed 'Speak From Here to There' (2016), and followed by 'A New Beginning' (2018), Tangling With The Epic explores commonalities and difference, the results reminding us of how poetry can offer comfort and solace, and how it can ignite a peculiar creative frenzy that enriches.

After completing four collections of dialogue in poems, Kwame Dawes in Nebraska (via Ghana and Jamaica) and John Kinsella in Western Australia, have produced a monumental fifth volume in four unHistory. unHistory is an essential record of our times by two world-leading poets, acutely sensitive to the bracing global turmoil of the last five years. It is an exploration of history’s undertones, its personal, familial, and institutional resonances and of the relationship between public events and the literary imagination. It is at the same time an elegant enactment of friendship and memory. As in previous volumes, the marvel is poetry that has all the fluidity of spontaneous response, and the shapeliness and finesse of the most deeply considered work written by two prolific and influential writers at the height of their powers as poets.

Focusing on the reggae superstar's poetry, this analysis explores the profound intellect and spirituality woven into the songwriter's lyrics. The examination is conducted with a scholarly precision typically reserved for iconic figures like Bob Dylan or John Lennon, offering a deep understanding of the artistic and philosophical dimensions of the music.