Mercurochrome: New Poems
Wanda Coleman
Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press
270 pp. $17 (paper); $30 (cloth trade)
In “Essay on Language
(7),” a poem from her new collection, Mercurochrome, Wanda Coleman spins a
line that reads: “… given a voice, one must struggle with one’s own social
type-casting on the edge of ambiguity.” In many ways, the sentiment represents
a sharply focused assessment of her work and approach. In Mercurochrome, she
walks both sides of the fence between a strong literary universality and an
inherently powerful racial identity. The Watts-born Coleman’s struggle to come
to terms with her social and racial type-casting gives the book an interesting
gestalt, making it seem a considered dance between the African-American personal
and a broader appreciation of literary archetype and standard. She handles the
turns well, giving legitimate props to her cultural background without
distancing those from other cultural backgrounds—not an easy task. For a number
of years, many young (and some not so young) African-American poets have been
given to broad pronouncements of frustration and anger—with good reason, of
course. The oppressed have a perfect right, even a responsibility, to cry
freedom; however, in these early days of new millennium, it is a strange truth
that such rights have been exercised to such an extent that many such protests
have begun to sound somewhat cliché through overuse. In a way, this descent
into cliché shows a degree of social promise, for when people of many races
recognize a single race’s cries as cliché it is a sign that that oppression
has lessened and that the voices of the oppressed have been significantly heard
and given due credence. Coleman is a living example of this social progression,
and throughout Mercurochrome, she strikes a perfect balance between her reality
as a woman of color in America and her readers’ need to connect and identify
regardless of origin.
Coleman’s language
use is superb throughout, brave yet measured, touching down in differing
intellectual and social spheres just long enough to please a spectrum of tastes
yet never remaining in any one long enough to alienate or bore. Her assured and
inventive imagery often thrills the reader, only rarely showing signs of poetic
self-consciousness or overt agenda. “South Central Los Angeles Death Trip 1982”
(from a section titled “Metaphysically Niggerish”) is a bit of overstated
though pertinent racial history, but it is only one patch of many sewn into a
multi-hued work along with sections like “Retro Rogue Anthology,” where
Coleman delves deeply into the nuts and bolts of poetry, playing off a number of
established poets like Patchen, Shapiro, Levertov, Borges, Bly, and others.
Levity and well-handled allusion on a craft level always earns our respect, and
poems like the play on Allen Ginsberg had us laughing out loud in simultaneous
appreciation and recognition.
Mercurochrome won a
National Book Award recently, and while we have to give Ms. Coleman an
obligatory rubber-band snap on the wrist for her insistence on the lowercase
form of the personal pronoun—why she of all people would seek to marginalize
herself in this manner is a mystery—we do find the work substantial and
elegant in its style, language, and approach, thus finding no reason to debate
the NBA assessment. We can state with a fond degree of security that Wanda
Coleman stands as a vital and important figure in modern American poetry, and
Mercurochrome shows her at her highest level of accomplishment.
–
CAW –
<<
BACK TO BOOK REVIEWS
