WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: October 16, 2024

Kwame Dawes’ Sturge Town was recently published by Norton. The book takes its title from a village in Jamaica—and uses it as an overriding metaphor for poems that travel from Ghana to the United States, stopping in one of the first free villages in post-emancipation Jamaica. Dawe’s poems sing with urgency—about crimes against black bodies, loss, addiction of a loved one, and the difficulties of religion. This is a book of mature wonderment and contemplation. All through these interior and exterior travels, Dawes poems are infused with light—wisdom, hope, and the actual sun.

https://poems.com/poem/light-home/

Congratulations, Kwame!

I’ve been reading Kwame Dawes for a while and especially loved his collection Nebraska (2019). That collection largely roots itself in Nebraska, though it touches other places by way of Dawes’s diasporic subjectivity. Sturge Town, on the other hand, moves through place and history readily. Nebraska, but also Jamaica, Ghana, throughout lineage and time. Dawes reflects on the legacies of slavery, parenting, love. As ever, Dawes has a lyric precision and momentum that are captivating to read. My main problem with this collection is that it was too long—I think three times the length of Nebraska—and without enough stylistic variety or book-wide momentum to support that. If this were three separate books, I’d have liked them all more.

Thanks to NetGalley and W.W. Norton for the ARC!

Kwame Dawes’s "Sturge Town" is a collection of sturdy but sparse poems that feels hampered by its length.

Poetry is subjective, so take these critiques with a fistful of salt.

I think good poems feel like watching a skilled dancer—the years of rehearsal are so effective that they are never felt. Every gesture feels birthed in the moment it appears, and the beauty and mystery of the art is the feeling that it could never be witnessed again.

"Sturge Town" doesn’t feel that way to me.

Although these poems are very competently written, they feel mechanically self-conscious, like seeing a dancer silently keep time or strain to hit their mark. Much of this seems rooted in the book’s length, which causes the specific dimensions of each poem to gradually lose their shape. It’s a shame because Dawes has clearly put so much intention and care into these pieces—it’s just that his voice becomes indistinct in such an expansive volume.

Ultimately, I found myself wanting to see the poet take more risks. His writing feels very traditional—one might say archaic—and, for me, it curbs any potential momentum. Kwame Dawes displays a surgical steadiness, but the excitement of poetry is that sometimes it’s okay to let your hand slip.

Kwame Dawes offers us a collection of poems so skillfully written as to seem effortless. Rich, honest, elegiac and richly detailed, Dawes anoints these poems - and us - with reverence for the places, people and experiences that make up his life's journey.