American Sublime: Poems

I was unfamiliar with Elizabeth Alexander until I heard her recitation at President Obama's inauguration. The delivery won me over, the cadence, words and the way Ms. Alexander looked into the audience as she spoke. Having just read her collection, "American Sublime," I am now an official fan. These poems are divided into four sections, I. American Blue, II. Ars Poetica, III. Amistad, and IV. American Sublime. Subjects are historical, experiential, thoughtful, illuminating and expressive in an assemblage of words which are sometimes so simple that it's hard to believe such a strong emotion is elicited. On the page, the ink is balanced. From Ars Poetica #100: I Believe: "Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, God in the details, the only way to get from here to there. Poetry (and now my voice is rising) is not all love, love, love, and I'm sorry the dog died. Poetry (here I hear myself loudest) is the human voice, and are we not of interest to each other?" These poems are Afro-American or African stories, but the instincts transcend our universal experiences. Read these and you will both learn and feel.

I have been an avid reader of Elizabeth Alexander poetry work since I discovered her first book, The Venus Hottentot, over a decade ago. Since then, I have returned to her poems for their particular blend of the vernacular and spectacular, the idiomatic and quixotic; for their splendidly free-wheeling yet formal-feeling lines and composition; for their ability to move from the individual to the communal and back again. In her newest poems, Alexander delivers on the promise of what poetry and what America can be. In bearing witness to brutality and beauty, in offering a poet's dismay at and hope for America's still unattained possibility, these poems are themselves sublime.