Let me sit
for awhile
and see if I feel better
Alienated by anti-poetic words
Symposium presentations
deadening of affect
My mind engorged by a headache
My limbs growing numb
I hurry out of the room
grab a sugary treat
to sit outside
in the sun
Building walls covered by harsh
techno renderings
of the beauty
of Sidney Nolan paintings
Walls coloured
a blue not of the sky
a blue with more green
than the piercing sky blue above
The walls asymmetric pattern
Yellow tiles in a ragged diagonal
small black square tiles
interspersed randomly
with colourized tiles
The sun on my back
Renewing
I cannot return
to the symposium
Dead words
causing bodily pain
Back inside the gallery
to briefly re-absorb
Sidney Nolan’s paintings
Then going out to catch
the Rapid 6 bus
taking me home
This book is as beautiful as the cover. The writing is so evocative that I had to read it carefully - word by word - the way I usually read poetry.
I often speed read novels. Satisfied with understanding the main story line, following the principal characters and immersing myself in the story without carefully reading each word. Not possible to speed read The Last Warner Woman.
And then Augustown
Augustown started slower for me. Something ominous surrounded the people in the novel. Something was going to happen. I read the novel with anxiety. At one point I put it aside. I didn’t want to know what was going to happen next.
Both books are based on Jamaican history and folk lore.
After reading Augustown, I looked up “Bedward“ and found the following:
“Between 1891 and 1921, Alexander Bedward, an African-Jamaican healer, led the Jamaica Baptist Free Church in August Town, Jamaica, on the Hope River. . .
In the 1930s, Bedwardites and Garveyites transformed Bedward's millenarianism into the more antiestablishment and durable Rastafarian movement…”
blackboards in his classroom with captivating chalk drawings of flowers.
