SCHOOL OF UDHRA, Nathaniel Mackey

SCHOOL OF UDHRA

Nathaniel Mackey

Publisher: City Lights Publishers
PubDate: 1/1/1993
ISBN: 9780872862784
Binding: PAPERBACK
Price: $9.95
Temporarily Out of Stock
 

Poetry. SCHOOL OF UDHRA takes its title from the Bedouin poetic tradition associated with the seventh century Arab poet Djamil, the Udhrite school of poets who, "when loving die." Bedouin tradition, however, is only one of the strands of world revery these poems have recourse to. They obey a "Bedouin" impulse of their own - fugitive, moving on, nomadic. Ogo the fox, the Dogon avatar of singleness and unrest, runs throughout, crossing and recrossing divided ground, primal isolate, insistent within the book's crosscultural weave. The poems track variances of union and disunion - social, sexual, mystic, mythic - both formally and in their content. They return rhapsody to its root sense: stitching together. Threads ranging through ancient Egypt, shamanic Siberia, Rastafarian Jamaica, and elsewhere figure in, inflected by conjunctive and disjunctive cadences inspired by jazz, Gnaoua trance chant, cante jondo, and other musics.

New Arrivals

The Last Selchie Child
Jane Yolen

Kino
Jurgen Fauth

For Out of the Heart Proceed
Jensen Beach

Though I Haven't Been to Baghdad
Margaret Rozga

This Beautiful Place
Tankred Dorst

The Books to Come
Alan Loney