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Execution Poems

by George Elliott Clarke 
Gaspereau Press, 2000

Review by Geoffrey Cook

This is the black before the blue: so popular that it has hit the presses twice. George Elliott Clarke’s Execution Poems were originally - and very beautifully, I’ve heard - issued in a hand-printed limited edition of 66 books in December of 2000. The foreword explaining the details of this hand-printing may be, for some, as interesting as the poetry: 25” x 19“ sheets were folded and trimmed to make a 12”18” paperback or leather-bound (hand sewn, both); and an original woodblock was engraved for the frontispiece by Wesley W. Bates of Ontario. The expensive limited edition sold out in a month. Luckily for us, Gaspereau Press, under the energetic and astute direction of Andrew Steeves, has issued a smaller, less expensive, but also very attractive edition.

Execution Poems is a black chapbook about Mr. Clarke’s cousins, George and Rufus Hamilton, who were hanged in 1949 for murdering a taxi driver with a hammer. The chapbook reveals Clarke’s huge talent with language: the trademark alliteration is as revved up as in the poet’s first collection, Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues; lines and stanzas move confidently among free verse, prose poetry and the traditional structures of song; metaphors are righteously original; and the language of the art is given greater range by cocking an unsentimental ear to the words of the street: “slup”, “uglified” , “ruck”, “scarepriest”, “sliggery”, the ubiquitous “ain’t”. Here’s street language given its proper place beside any other:

Haligonian Market Cry

I got hallelujah watermelons! - virginal pears! - virtuous corn!
Munit haec altera vincit!
Luscious, fat-ass watermelons! - plump pears! - big-butt corn!
Le gusta este jardin!
Come-and-get-it cucumbers - hot-to-trot, lust-fresh cucumbers!
Voulez -vous coucher avec moi?
Watermelons! - Go-to-church-and-get-redeemed watermelons!
O peccatore, in verità!
Good God cucumbers! - righteous pears! - golden Baptist corn!
Die Reue ist doch nur ein leuchter Kauf!
I got sluttish watermelons! - sinful cucumbers! - jail-bait pears! -
Planted by Big-Mouth Chaucer and picked by Evil Shakespeare!

With all this language, you get, of course, a defiant, exuberant, provocative black-on-white (titles-in-blood-red) spirit dance of politics, racism, religion, psycho-sexual song and grumble, all whipping the reader on. Shocking, comic, controversial, a liberation of both fact and fiction for the sake of song, “Execution Poems” gives a nastily clear image of “how history darkens against its medium” (from “Childhood II”):

Negation

XXXLe nègre negated, meagre, c’est moi:
A whiskey-coloured provincial, uncouth
Mouth spitting lies, vomit-lyrics, musty,
Masticated scripture. Her Majesty’s
Nasty, Nofaskoshan Negro, I mean
To go out shining instead of tarnished,
To take apart poetry like a heart.
XXXMy black face must preface murder for you.

“My speech? Pretty ugly,” says George in “Trial I”:

My English is like fractured China - broken.
I really speak Coloured, but with a Three Mile Plains accent.
See, I can’t speak Lucasville and my New Road’s kinda weak.
Ma English be a desert that don’t bloom less watered by rum.

Or as Rue retorts to the Crown, complimenting the murderer’s “almost perfect English”: “But, your alabaster, marble English isn’t mine: I hurl / insolent daggers at it like an assassin assaulting a statue... My duty is to make narrative more telling...”

While we are made to empathize with the murderers, certainly these fellows expose a history of ignorance, racism, violence, poverty, and, well, desire: as much to overcome as to be buried in this tragic destiny. The entertainment of Execution Poems never lets a reader escape the horror which bred such beauty: instead of a proper education in literature, which Rue dreamed of, he witnesses (in prose):

A boy’s right arm stuck to a desk with scissors; a father knifed in the gut while shaking hands with a buddy; two Christians splashed with gasoline and set ablaze in a church; a harlot garroted in her bath; a bootlegger shot through the eye in a liquor store; a banker brained in a vault; two artists thrown into the Gaspereau River with their hands tied behind their backs; a pimp machine-gunned to bits outside a school; a divine getting his throat slit; a poet axed in the back of the neck; a Tory buried alive in cement; two diabetics fed cyanide secreted in chocolates; a lawyer decapitated in his office.

In Rue’s world, sex-education opens Pandora’s (black) box of desire:

Hatchets of sunlight; a horse’s black ass; a decayed dreamer in a cell of dung; Ma in an attitude of licking my bum; grotesque, gaudy insects; disgusting infants with snakes’ heads; me inside a drum hammered shut, cringing; vomiting; statues with eyeholes bandaged over; reptiles’ puncturing fangs; plush cockroaches crawling and crawling into and out of my mouth; red stench of ass blood; a priest being shat on by a dog; a vague idea of flaps of flesh from incisions made during sodomy. I hear comparisons of me to a pig, a monkey, a cow. I am alone much. The burden of bitch-birthed bastardy.

The lives rendered in Execution Poems only seem cheap; the book is; immerse yourself in it - as black, deep, fast, strong, fatal, and fun as Nova Scotian water.

Geoffrey Cook is one of The Danforth Review's Poetry Editors.

 

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The Danforth Review is produced in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. All content is copyright of its creator and cannot be copied, printed, or downloaded without the consent of its creator. The Danforth Review is edited by Michael Bryson. Poetry Editors are Geoff Cook and Shane Neilson. Reviews Editors are Anthony Metivier (fiction) and Erin Gouthro (poetry). TDR alumnus officio: K.I. Press. All views expressed are those of the writer only. International submissions are encouraged. The Danforth Review is archived in the National Library of Canada. ISSN 1494-6114. 

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