The illustrations & images particularly brought this book together for me. The book is physically beautiful with pleasing design: cover, music sheet endpapers, poem on right - illustration on left, the concept of the poems as a requiem in vocal parts. That was all good.
The poems themselves didn't blow me away. Fortune's story is fascinating (I think I enjoyed the non-fiction, left page bits more than the poems themselves), and as I said above, I like the idea of the requiem, but most of the poems seemed overly simple, even awkward in parts.
I call a hey, Luigi, come-a quick:What's with that? It makes me think of some bushy-browed pizza man dressed like one of the Super Mario Bros. exclaiming over Fortune's skeleton. Mamma mia!
The parts I read from Nelson's Carver: A Life in Poems at Simmons, struck me as being more sophisticated. It seems that a lot of thought and care went into Fortune's Bones (Author's Note, research involved, notes, requiem structure, the museum itself) but I was left wanting in the poetry department.
See Fortune's Story at the Mattatuck Museum, if you haven't already.
3 comments:
I think I'll agree with your comments. I liked the design of the book (and the verso pages were tres interesting), and I love the idea of a manumission requiem. But I was looking for a little more beef in the poetry department. The poems I thought were fine, some really good, but I wish there were more. It just felt like there could have been more perspectives, more stories within Fortune's story, more words over which we can mull and ponder, more rhythms to enjoy.
Granted, I did cartwheels when I saw how short the book was (this is the first one I've finished on time), but I wish I had gotten a little more out of it. It really hasn't stayed with me much, which is never a good sign for me.
I will even go so far as to say that this poetry was NOT good. In my humble opinion. I actually felt myself actively disliking much of it as I read it.
I am kinda picky about poetry though.
I also thought to myself, "Hmm. She was better when she didn't KNOW she was writing for children."
Guh. And I paid for this book, too.
I wished there was more factual info about Fortune, but then I expect there isn't much to be found on the documentation of the lives of slaves. Reading the book reminded me of anatomy class. We used real skeletons, I think our skeletons came from India. It was a really odd feeling to hold those bones, particularly the skulls, and realize that 1)those bones were once real people living and eating and talking to other people and 2) someday that will be all there is left of me.
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