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· William Lisle Bowles: The Dying Slave · Women Who Change the World: Stories from the Fight for Social Justice by Lynn Lewis (Editor) · Harvest Lingo by Lionel Fogarty · Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021 by Yusef Komunyakaa · Roger Robinson: A Portable Paradise (Poetry) · BLACK LIVES MATTER

William Lisle Bowles: The Dying Slave

The Dying Slave

Faint-gazing on the burning orb of day,
When Afric’s injured son expiring lay,
His forehead cold, his labouring bosom bare,
His dewy temples, and his sable hair,
His poor companions kissed, and cried aloud,
Rejoicing, whilst his head in peace he bowed:—
Now thy long, long task is done,
Swiftly, brother, wilt thou run,
Ere to-morrow’s golden beam
Glitter on thy parent stream,
Swiftly the delights to share,
The feast of joy that waits thee there.
Swiftly, brother, wilt thou ride
O’er the long and stormy tide,
Fleeter than the hurricane,
Till thou see’st those scenes again,
Where thy father’s hut was reared,
Where thy mother’s voice was heard;
Where thy infant brothers played
Beneath the fragrant citron shade;
Where through green savannahs wide
Cooling rivers silent glide,
Or the shrill cicalas sing
Ceaseless to their murmuring;
Where the dance, the festive song,
Of many a friend divided long,
Doomed through stranger lands to roam,
Shall bid thy spirit welcome home!
Fearless o’er the foaming tide
Again thy light canoe shall ride;
Fearless on the embattled plain
Thou shalt lift thy lance again;
Or, starting at the call of morn,
Wake the wild woods with thy horn;
Or, rushing down the mountain-slope,
O’ertake the nimble antelope;
Or lead the dance, ‘mid blissful bands,
On cool Andracte’s yellow sands;
Or, in the embowering orange-grove,
Tell to thy long-forsaken love
The wounds, the agony severe,
Thy patient spirit suffered here!
Fear not now the tyrant’s power,
Past is his insulting hour;
Mark no more the sullen trait
On slavery’s brow of scorn and hate;
Hear no more the long sigh borne
Murmuring on the gales of morn!
Go in peace; yet we remain
Far distant toiling on in pain;
Ere the great Sun fire the skies
To our work of woe we rise;
And see each night, without a friend,
The world’s great comforter descend!
Tell our brethren, where ye meet,
Thus we toil with weary feet;
Yet tell them that Love’s generous flame,
In joy, in wretchedness the same,
In distant worlds was ne’er forgot;
And tell them that we murmur not;
Tell them, though the pang will start,
And drain the life-blood from the heart,—
Tell them, generous shame forbids
The tear to stain our burning lids!
Tell them, in weariness and want,
For our native hills we pant,
Where soon, from shame and sorrow free,
We hope in death to follow thee!

William Lisle Bowles
(1762 – 1850)
The Dying Slave

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Women Who Change the World: Stories from the Fight for Social Justice by Lynn Lewis (Editor)

Inspiring oral histories of women fighting for justice and radical social change at community, state, and national levels.

Award-winning oral historian Lynn Lewis brings together the stories of nine exceptional women, from their earliest formative experiences to their current strategies as movement leaders, organizers, and cultural workers.

Each chapter is dedicated to one activist—Malkia Devich-Cyril, Priscilla Gonzalez, Terese Howard, Hilary Moore, Vanessa Nosie, Roz Pelles, Loretta Ross, Yomara Velez, and Betty Yu.

Reflecting upon the path their lives have taken, they talk about their struggles and aspirations, insights and victories, and what keeps them in the fight for a better world.

The life stories of these inspiring women reveal the many ways the experience of injustice can catalyze resistance and a commitment to making change. They demonstrate how the relationships and bonds of collective struggle for the common good not only win justice, but create hope, love, and joy.

Lynn Lewis (editor) is an oral historian, educator, and community organizer. She is the author of Love and Collective Resistance: Lessons from the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project and is the former executive director and past civil rights organizer at Picture the Homeless. Lewis is the recipient of many honors and awards, including a 2022/2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Oral History Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

Women Who Change the World:
Stories from the Fight for Social Justice
by Lynn Lewis (Editor)
ISBN-13: 9780872868748
Publisher: City Lights Books
Series: City Lights Open Media
Publication date: 08/29/2023
Pages: 280
Paperback
$17.95

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Harvest Lingo by Lionel Fogarty

Harvest Lingo is the fourteenth collection of poems by Lionel Fogarty, a Murri man with traditional connections to the Yugambeh people from south of Brisbane and the Kudjela people of north Queensland.

He is a leading Indigenous rights activist, and one of Australia’s foremost poets, and this collection displays all of the urgency, energy and linguistic audacity for which Fogarty is known.

At the centre of the collection is a series of poems written in India. Deeply empathetic, these poems are remarkable for the connections they draw between the social problems the poet encounters in this country – poverty, class division, corruption – and those he sees in contemporary Australia, besetting his own people.

Other poems tell of encounters between people and between cultures, address historical and cultural issues and political events, and pay tribute to important Indigenous figures. There are intensely felt lyrics of personal experience, and poems which contemplate Fogarty’s own position as a poet and an activist, speaking with and for his community.

Fogarty’s poems are bold and fierce, at times challenging and confronting, moved by strong rhythms and a remarkable freedom with language. They are an expression of the ‘harvest lingo’ which gives the collection its title.

Lionel Fogarty was born on Wakka Wakka land, at Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve in south-east Queensland in 1957. Throughout the 1970s he worked as an activist for Aboriginal Land Rights, and in the 1990s, after the death of his brother Daniel Yock, protesting against Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. His poetry collections date from the early 1980s; his most recent collections are Connection Requital; Mogwie-Idan: Stories of the Land; Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future), all with Vagabond Press, and Lionel Fogarty: Selected Poems 1980-2017, published by re.press.

Harvest Lingo
by Lionel Fogarty
Poetry
Giramondo Publishing
112 pages
Paperback, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published June 2022
ISBN 9781925336177
$25,00

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Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021 by Yusef Komunyakaa

New and selected poets from the

great Pulitzer Prize–winning poet

Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth brings together selected poems from the past twenty years of Yusef Komunyakaa’s work, as well as new poems from the Pulitzer Prize winner.

Komunyakaa’s masterful, concise verse conjures arresting images of peace and war, the natural power of the earth and of love, his childhood in the American South and his service in Vietnam, the ugly violence of racism in America, and the meaning of power and morality.

The new poems in this collection add a new refrain to the jazz-inflected rhythms of one of our “most significant and individual voices” (David Wojahn, Poetry).

Komunyakaa writes of a young man fashioning a slingshot, workers who “honor the Earth by opening shine / inside the soil,” and the sounds of a saxophone filling a dim lounge in New Jersey. As April Bernard wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “He refuses to be trivial; and he even dares beauty.”

These songs run along dirt roads
& highways, crisscross lonely seas
& scale mountains, traverse skies
& underworlds of neon honkytonk,
Wherever blues dare to travel.

Yusef Komunyakaa (born James William Brown, April 29, 1941) is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to the poetry world. His subject matter ranges from the black experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights era and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.

Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth:
New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021
by Yusef Komunyakaa
Publisher: ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux
(June 15, 2021)
Language: ‎ English
288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374600139
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374600136
Hardcover $25.60
Paperback $18.00

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Roger Robinson: A Portable Paradise (Poetry)

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020 and the RSL Ondaatje Prize!

These are finely crafted poems that reveal Roger Robinson’s capacity to tell involving stories and capture the essence of a character in a few words, to move the emotions with the force of verbal expression, and engage our thoughts, as in the sequence of poems that reflect on just what paradise might be. A Portable Paradise is a feast to be carried by lovers of poetry wherever they go.

Roger Robinson’s range is wide: the joys and pains of family life; the ubiquitous presence of racism, both subtle and unsubtle; observations on the threatening edge of violence below the surface energies of Black British territories in London; emblematic poems on the beauty and often bizarre strangeness of the world of animals; quizzical responses to the strange, the heartening, and the appalling in incidents or accounts of incidents encountered in daily life; reflections on the purposes and costs of making art, as in fine poems on a George Stubbs’ painting, John Coltrane’s Ascension and cocaine. Not least, in the sequence of poems that reflect on the meanings of the Grenfell Tower fire, Roger Robinson finds ways to move beyond a just indignation to uncover the undertones of experience that bring us nearer to the human reality of that event.

The collection’s title points to the underlying philosophy expressed in these poems: that earthly joy is, or ought to be, just within, but is often just beyond our reach, denied by racism, misogyny, physical cruelty and those with the class power to deny others their share of worldly goods and pleasures. A Portable Paradise is not the emptiness of material accumulation, but joy in an openness to people, places, the sensual pleasures of food and the rewards to be had from the arts of word, sound and visual enticement – in short an “insatiable hunger” for life. The poems express a fierce anger against injustice, but also convey the irrepressible sense that Roger Robinson cannot help but love people for their humour, oddity and generosity of spirit.

These are finely crafted poems, that reveal Roger Robinson’s capacity to tell involving stories and capture the essence of a character in a few words, to move the emotions with the force of verbal expression, and engage our thoughts, as in the sequence of poems that reflect on just what paradise might be. A Portable Paradise is a feast to be carried by lovers of poetry wherever they go.

• Roger Robinson is a writer and performer who lives between London and Trinidad. His first full poetry collection, The Butterfly Hotel, was shortlisted for The OCM Bocas Poetry Prize. He has toured extensively with the British Council and is a co-founder of both Spoke Lab and the international writing collective Malika’s Kitchen.

• Review by Bernardine Evaristo for the New Statesman on Wednesday, November 13, 2019: “A Portable Paradise (Peepal Tree Press) is the fourth poetry collection by Trinidadian-British poet Roger Robinson. It’s also his finest, ranging from the most breath-taking poems about the Grenfell Tower fire to the most exquisitely moving poems about the premature birth of his son, who had to fight for his life in an incubator. His poems are deep, mature, moving and inventive.”

A Portable Paradise
Roger Robinson (author)
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd
ISBN: 9781845234331
Number of pages: 144
Dimensions: 206 x 135 mm
Paperback
Published: 08/07/2019
£9.99