Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems

This first U.S. selection from the Jamaica-bred, Nebraska-based poet (he also has a reputation in Britain) is his 16th book of verse in just 20 years; it reveals a writer syncretic, effusive, affectionate, alert to familial joys, but also sensitive to history, above all to the struggles of African diasporic history—the Middle Passage, sharecropper-era South Carolina, the Kingston of Bob Marley, whose song gives this big book its title. Dawes is at home with cityscape and seascape, patois and transatlantic tradition; in the title poem from his first book, “Progeny of Air,” “propellers undress the sea;/ the pattern of foam like a broken zip/ opening where the bow cuts the wave.” Yet he is drawn more often to life stories: his troubled brother, his own relocations, Marley and Marley’s widow Rita, the archetypal wanderers of the American South: “Hurl me through memory,” he writes in “Carolina Gold,” “and I will return... with the stories strangers/ tell me at the crossroads.” Thirty-nine new poems speak to and about the characters in August Wilson’s plays: “You, August, have carried in your belly,/ every song of affront your characters/ have spoken.... and in this cacophonic chorus/ we find the ritual of living.” (Apr.)