You Don't Miss Your Water

by Cornelius Eady

Overview

A reissuing of You Don't Miss Your Water, poems by Cornelius Eady.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780887484162
Publisher:	Carnegie-Mellon University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2004
Series:	Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series: Poetry Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

CORNELIUS EADY is Associate Professor of Literature at American University. Formerly director of the Poetry Center at SUNY/Stony Brook, and visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the City College of New York, his many honors include the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Award, and fellowships from the Rockefeller, Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest, and John Simon Guggenheim Foundations. The author of seven volumes of poetry, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, The Autobiographhy of a Jukebox, and Brutal Imagination, he is cofounder, with Toi Derracotte, of Cave Canem, which offers workshops and retreats to African-American poets. Eady lives with the novelist Sarah Micklem in Washington D.C.

Table of Contents

I Know (I'm Losing You) • A Little Bit of Soap • One Kind Favor • Fetchin' Bones • Soothe Me • A Rag, a Bone, and a Hank of Hair • All God's Dangers • Motherless Children • Papa Was a Rolling Stone • I Ain't Got No Home • It's Only a Paper Moon • The Way You Do the Things You Do • The Chapel of Love • Going Down Slow • Travelin' Shoes • Money (That's What I Want) • Another Man Done Gone • I Just Wanna Testify • You Don't Miss Your Water • Deuce and a Quarter • Paradiso

What People are Saying About This

E. Ethelbert Miller

“You Don’t Miss Your Water is a gem. Twenty-one poems for any man to put in his pocket whenever he leaves his father’s house. These poems are blue psalms about life, family, and death. Cornelius Eady opens his heart and gives us poetry filled with tears and strength. There is so much honesty in this book it forces the reader to look into the mirror before the well runs dry.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

“Who wants wisdom will find it here, but will be able to breathe under its introduction. Obviously the poet is committed to positives. He of the involved voice is determined; direct; alert; confident.”

Editorial Reviews

This is a small book of tremendous power and grace. In 21 poems, Eady (The Gathering of My Name) illuminates experiences evoked by his father's dying, making quick, startling leaps of connection with the precisely chosen details of a born storyteller. Like a high-wire walker moving steadily along an almost invisible tension, Eady writes with simplicity and apparent ease. As he depicts his and his mother's responses to the difficult, belittling and secretive father, a convincing and moving portrait of the three emerges. Blues, rock, pop songs and hymns give these poems titles and context, linking the vernacular with the universal. ``I think that every hymn is a flare of longing, that the key to any heaven is language.'' Eady's joy in language engenders our trust in the music that his art has made of love and pain. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Eady, winner of the coveted Lamont award for his second book, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Ommation Pr., 1986), is quickly emerging as one of the most skilled and sensitive African American writers. In 21 haunting prose poems, he meditates on his father's death and black American familial realities (the unmarried mother, the girl in school with the same last name) and comes to terms with specific childhood memories. The poems are related through image, not chronology, and the tone ranges from confessional to ironic. Emotions are similarly tumultuous and conflicting. But mobility and tension, stress and stupor give this volume its prowess. It is disconcerting to see six pages of blurbs fleshing out 33 pages of poetry, but that cannot undermine this honest and heartfelt dirge, especially when the "silly boy" who (in his father's eyes) never did real work explains near the end, "They're paying me to write about your life."Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York

Library Journal