Carolyn Beard Whitlow’s VANISHED

Winner  of the 2006

Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award

 

“In Vanished, Carolyn Beard Whitlow is as she says, ‘seeking the heal of words’—‘some self assembly required.’ Whether she uses a sestina or a villanelle, Whitlow croons the blues of a strong-hearted woman singing herself out of the past. Vanished performs magic—it gives voice to the voiceless, body to the vanished. I love the nakedness of the love poems…. There is no false turn in this book….”

—Toi Derricotte


“We have a siren who lives by metaphor, all the neighborhoods she’s occupied, traversed, transcended—and there are ‘notes’ at the end: much of her history is not written down, or unwritten, or cadenced with a ‘scrupulous meanness’ (James Joyce) intended for dissection and worse, the aftermath of slavery and neglect where ‘some people talk back.’ This is a poet with fluency and cadence in prosody, an inclination toward Motown and the blues, but feints in sestina and villanelle for both circularity and word-play. She attends to organization, in units, as increment, as progression: so many losses, frustrations, but beneath the floss of voicing ‘within the veil’ a prideful storytelling in origami detail: all in her own idiom. In her world one can become one’s own parents and kinfolk, the ancestors singing. ‘And silence, too, is talk.’ (African proverb).”
—Michael Harper

ISBN: 0-916418-96-0   available at www.lotuspress.org 112 pages (paper) $18.00