Paul Scott Stanfield reviews a moving new collection of poetry that refuses to stand still.
Shane Book, All Black Everything (University of Iowa Press, Kuhl House Poets), 92pp.
Besides the customary thanks to editors and foundations and to friends and family, the acknowledgements of Shane Book’s third collection, All Black Everything, include the statement, “I am grateful to have been able to write this book while living in a number of places whose geographies have shaped these poems,” followed by an alphabetical list of thirty-five towns and cities, beginning with Accra and ending with Volterra. Book apparently likes to keep moving, and All Black Everything keeps moving, too. The poems evoke Haiti, Ghana, Brazil, and Vietnam as well as Canada, where Book grew up and now teaches; the volume takes as its territory the whole busy, bristling globe depicted in the painting on its cover (Jack Whitten’s Black Monolith V: Full Circle: For LeRoi Jones A.K.A. Amiri Baraka). The book begins in motion, as it were, with “Africa to Almost Spain: A Migration,” about a modern journey with uncanny echoes of the Middle Passage. And the poems themselves never stay in one place, moving in a blink from one kind of diction to another, from one register to another, shape-shifting before the reader’s eyes.
Book’s previous collection, Congotronic, presented a comparably high level of mobility. In “Mack Daddy Manifesto” a voice resembling that of Iceberg Slim (author of Pimp: The Story of My Life) starts slinging quotations from Marx and Freud–incongruous, or is it? Who better to synthesize the great theorist of work with the great theorist of sex than someone deeply familiar with sex work? The juxtaposition of dramatically different registers is no new trick, certainly; it is at least as old as The Waste Land, where elegant lines from Edmund Spenser sit alongside doggerel about Mrs. Porter and her daughters. What is new is that the incongruity in Eliot is meant to be jarring, a clash of the high and the low, but Book is making a weave in which “high” and “low” no longer figure. He puts us a little in mind of British musician Shabaka Hutchings, based in jazz but also capable of futurist digital experiments, or of playing traditional African instruments, collaborating one minute with Andre 3000 of OutKast and the next with avant-gardists like Floating Points. Like Hutchings, Book seems to have a kind of universal passport that lets him sail over boundaries, nonchalantly code-switching as he goes.
“Kofi Mnemonic” may be about a Ghanaian version of Johnny Mnemonic, the young cyber-hustler played by Keanu Reeves in the 1995 film. It begins: “There is great sadness in this poorest of lands. / The only Lambo in the land / belongs to my Christian friend.” The first line’s seeming echo of an ancient lament immediately gives place to the breezily contemporary “Lambo,” and then a coolly elegant celebration of Italian automotive engineering spins into the quick, nervy rhythms of hip-hop:
the most precise steel in the most aggressive heels
of Italian steel ever felt in the sternum,
a chemical kind of power,
a space coupe dressed as
beauty
shard
flower.
Very hardcore business, man.
I’m a business, man.
Our dearest anthropologist always warns us
of past things: a blade song, a greed radio,
But y’all too busy tryna find
that blue-eyed hole. Me,
I let my black hair grow
and my stroke go
and my smoke mow
down my sweat
too much on the regular.
The poem seems to occupy several positions at once, and the ironies multiply. The Lambo makes frequent trips to Spain for repairs, or possibly for smuggling (“filled with hollow mangoes filled with / I-can’t-feel-my-face things”), but the roads of “this poorest of lands” are “too wrecked / to wreck a piece of art blaster. / In a fortified garage, the car hulks.”
The poems’ titles often seem to have drifted in from a social media feed (“All the Feels,” “Dad Bod,” “You Do You”), and their diction veers into the colloquial only to veer out again, passing through the lyrical and the satirical en route to the hallucinatory:
First thing
Imma do is grow
my movement beard,
feel some type o’ way.
But you must live
in the Midwest,
be so inside
these landscaped
brethren
like a new gold scarf
underwater.
Why they making me
read this when I got no vote?
Pernicious malarian citizen
rocking the argue mandible,
it heard us. (“Dad Bod”)
“Ideology, or The Dream of a Guap-ified Field,” a title that may be alluding to Marx, Einstein, and Jorie Graham all at the same time, sounds like a rap battle that turns into a tornado of consumerism, surveillance, and capital:
Yo-James-Let’s Hit-The-Club,
let’s lit the club right off the block,
I got mad guap to blow,
most often cash money,
showing high degrees of
purchase tower swagger
for fast-depreciation consumer honey:
luxury cars, electronics, power
to the people power.
All this to say, I beat
you fair and square in that race.
Anywhere you look,
you being watched hard
in the eye
of a money storm.
Much of All Black Everything has the flowing rapidity of the quoted poems, but Book is equally deft at the longer lines and gentler music of “A Few Used Doilies,” dedicated to the memory of one of his teachers, the late Eavan Boland:
A moment came when I should have said something,
even so, I would like, in this deserted old village
of colonial churches, drifting sea birds,
to feel part of a large thinking both historical and mine
prior to the inevitable turning into a revered
monument shaped of a stranger’s reverie
since all that gets done is much too concerned
with friendships and partial misunderstanding
of what fits and the disfiguring process happens
with time, anyway and just for this reason
those concerns are least respected, thus passively
left alone to languish amidst the roadside frog calls.
We are in a different landscape here, and probably in a different subject position too. A spiraling, Hamlet-like introspection governs the poem’s movement, with a corresponding Jamesian entanglement coiling the sentence.
Even with all the voices that constitute the polyphony of All Black Everything, evenwith its wonder-inducing stylistic variety, it has a center. The years since Congotronic appeared in 2014 have seen a revolution in Black communities and the societies those communities exist in—i.e., as the book underlines again and again, all societies, everywhere. Echoes of that revolution reverberate throughout the collection, as in these lines from “Nice for What,” a long poem set mainly in Jamaica:
When I returned from it,
svelte and swaddled in a dark blue
pinstripe suit, I came to your door
and wept, right where slavery evolved
into Jim Crow
into Mass Incarceration
into The Realities We Have Today […].
The speaker’s relationship to the revolution is often foregrounded, but not always easy to interpret, as in “Bean Pies on a Point Breeze Stoop:”
For the whole interview
I had a black ski mask
on my Black face
and it made even
the Black
hip-hop radio hosts
nervous.
As the Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote after the Easter Rising, a newly emerging reality may elude definition, and we may have more questions than we do answers, but we do know we are in a new reality—that all is transformed, transformed utterly. Book writes in “Glock Weather:”
Chilling in my inner Dubai, I get by
My fire is fire.
My inside desert is lit. By the oil fires
of a thousand American bloodsuns,
they goin’ make me interview again for it.
Next time I see him, waiting on line
at the fish bar, my Cape Verdean barber
tells me I been looking fly.
International flex. This the real face.
Après getting my hair did
at the only Black barbershop
in a slate-walled English town,
I feel this sound from the other side.
Who be that.
Paul Scott Stanfield was educated at Grinnell College and Northwestern University, and is recently retired from the English Department of Nebraska Wesleyan University. He is the author of Yeats and Politics in the 1930s and of articles on Yeats, other Irish poets, and Wyndham Lewis.
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