Splay Anthem (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780811216524)

Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections--"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub")--Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu" (though "Mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou").

In the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are progenitor spirits, and the song of the Andoumboulou is a song addressed to the spirits, a funeral song, a song of rebirth. "Mu," too, splays with meaning: muni bird, Greek muthos, a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Mira painting, Mackey's poems trace the lost tribe of "we" through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth's music, spirit lift.

Author: Nathaniel Mackey
ISBN-10: 0811216527
ISBN-13: 9780811216524
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Language: English
Published: 05/17/2006
Pages: 112
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.48lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.06w x 0.45d
Award: National Book Awards - Winner

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/03/2006 pg. 40
Library Journal 08/15/2006 pg. 91
Library Journal 08/01/2006 pg. 91
Library Journal 04/15/2007 pg. 90
Black Issues Book Review 03/01/2007 pg. 18