Red Clay Suite

by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Overview

In her third book of poems, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers expresses her familiarity with the actual and imaginary spaces that the American South occupies in our cultural lexicon. Her two earlier books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue and Outlandish Blues, use the blues poetic to explore notions of history and trauma. Now, in Red Clay Suite, Jeffersapproaches the southern landscape as utopia and dystopia—a crossroads of race, gender, and blood. These poems signal the ending movement of her crossroads blues and complete the last four “bars” of a blues song, resting on the final, and essential, note of resolution and reconciliation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809387588
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/26/2007
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	930 KB

About the Author

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, an assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, is the author of two other books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue and Outlandish Blues.

Table of Contents

Contents Prologue Red Clay Suite 00 1. Migration Cantos Word on Earth 00 Passing 00 Giving Thanks for Water 00 An Angel, Unaware 00 The Compass of Moss 00 Let Blood Go 00 Cotton Field Sestina 00 Eatonton (Two) 00 Driving Interstate West through Georgia 00 2. Dark Pastoral Blues Aubade (or, Revision of the Lean Post-Modernist Pastorale) 00 Mister Buzzard and Brother Crow 00 Consider My Brother as the Rabbit 00 dirty south moon 00 Here, One of Your Four Women 00 One Morning Soon 00 Poem for Birds 00 Another Easter Poem 00 I¿ve Been Up Late Reading the Book of Poems You Inscribed and Mailed to Me 00 Their Splendid 00 The Blues I Don¿t Want to Remember 00 What Is Written for Me 00 Lexicon 00 3. Red Clay Reprise The Little Boy Who Will Be My Father 00 Suddenly in Grace 00 The Subject of Gardening 00 Days Are Plain 00 Eatonton (One) 00 Reunion Scripture 00 Why I Will Praise an Old Black Man 00 What Grief Is 00 Hawk Hoof Tea 00 Oklahoma Naming 00 Upon Learning That My Indian Student Is a Sundancer 00 Notes 00

Editorial Reviews

Anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading Honorée Jeffers’s poems—or of hearing her read them—knows that she’s a blues poet with things to say and new ways of saying them. Red Clay Suite is her best book to date, and a triumph; she uses everyday language and she makes it sing.”—Ed Ochester, editor of American Poetry Now: The Pitt Poetry Series Anthology and author of Unreconstructed: Poems New and Selected



“Honorée Jeffers leads with her ear and follows with her rigorous intellect, then adds an emotional depth and fearlessness that make her poems uniquely powerful. This brilliant third book is a thinking woman’s blues that continues to challenge, delight, and terrify.”—Elizabeth Alexander, author of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated American Sublime

From the Publisher