| In her enchanting poem sequence, Doris Davenport introduces
readers to Soque Street and its "Affrilacian" residents. These
African Americans inhabiting an Appalachian community in northeast
Georgia live in a world where magic threads daily life and the
living and dead commingle. Ghosts, self-propelled caskets, and
sensate trees are as natural as morning glories to these characters,
who are at once eccentric and universal, peculiar and welcoming.
Spoken in intersecting and overlapping monologues, the poems
create a refreshing portrait of small-town life, with its
mix of quotidian concerns and the larger experiences of love,
passion, grief, jealousy, and madness. The story of Soque
Street moves from voice to voice and through poetic forms
with ease and confidence. Sometimes frightening, often funny,
and always compelling and potent, Madness like Morning
Glories is a major achievement by a poet of tremendous
originality who possesses an intuition for the subtle secrets
of language.
Soque is a Cherokee word turned Black on the Hill
across the railroad track, in Appalachian foothills where
madness like morning glories took over everyone trying to
be
insane and acceptable all the time and all the while, hainted.
Two rows of houses along the railroad track
Mr. Oscar Wise, the Peanut Man, and his family
still there in the air and honeysuckles, hainted.
Mack, our cousin, said he saw a casket roll down Soque,
Stop in front of 103 and roll back up the hill again.
—from "Ceremony for 103 Soque Street"
doris davenport is a performance poet, writer, and
Associate Professor of English at Albany State University.
Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies,
including Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia; Out
of the Rough: Women's Poems of Survival and Celebration; Bloodroot:
Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers; and
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of
Color. She has done more than 100 poetry performances
and workshops and has taught at several colleges and universities,
including Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Davenport
received her B.A. in English from Paine College, her M.A.
in English from SUNY-Buffalo, and her Ph.D. in African American
literature from the University of Southern California. Born
and raised in Gainesville and Cornelia, Georgia, in the foothills
of Appalachia, she currently lives in Albany, Georgia. |
