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A review by steveatwaywords
Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
It's safe to say I have never read a collection of contemporary poetry quite as targeted and profound as this one. Lewis demonstrates through a range of style and poetic subject (personal, mythological, sociological, art historical, familial) the racist objectifying and mythologizing of the black female body and of the concept of beauty.
It's most significant section, the middle of the book, is something so unlike Found Poetry that I hesitate to describe it that way: a massive collection of the plaque descriptions of artwork across time and culture whose subjects are black women. It is an overwhelming, swelling, suffocating stream of images and coldness, revealing what passed for enlightened cultural preservation but is in fact something quite apart. I felt as I read it that I was passed from the poetic altogether . . .
But Lewis does not leave us there, and where that closes and the final section opens we see a resolve to confront it with life itself.
Here she is early in the book (line spacing incorrect):
For a certain amount
of rupees, the temple’s hired a man to announce
to tourists . . , During the medieval
period virgins were sacrificed here.
His capitalist glance mirrors our Orientalist tans.
You're lying, 1 say. Save it
for somebody pale. He smiles, passes
me a bidi. I’m bleeding, but lie
so I can go inside and see
that burnt, charred piece
of the Goddess that fell off
right here.
...I have to go back
to that wet black thing
dead in the road. I have to turn around.
I must put my face in it.
It's most significant section, the middle of the book, is something so unlike Found Poetry that I hesitate to describe it that way: a massive collection of the plaque descriptions of artwork across time and culture whose subjects are black women. It is an overwhelming, swelling, suffocating stream of images and coldness, revealing what passed for enlightened cultural preservation but is in fact something quite apart. I felt as I read it that I was passed from the poetic altogether . . .
But Lewis does not leave us there, and where that closes and the final section opens we see a resolve to confront it with life itself.
Here she is early in the book (line spacing incorrect):
For a certain amount
of rupees, the temple’s hired a man to announce
to tourists . . , During the medieval
period virgins were sacrificed here.
His capitalist glance mirrors our Orientalist tans.
You're lying, 1 say. Save it
for somebody pale. He smiles, passes
me a bidi. I’m bleeding, but lie
so I can go inside and see
that burnt, charred piece
of the Goddess that fell off
right here.
...I have to go back
to that wet black thing
dead in the road. I have to turn around.
I must put my face in it.