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Poetry Friday: Happy New Year and Two Book Reviews
Happpy Poetry Friday to all participants in this welcoming and gracious community of poets!
Today, I’ll review the other poetry book I was gifted from Sarah Grace Tuttle and also, one I received in the mail, entitled Feel The Beat by Marilyn Singer. I’m afraid I do not remember which blog or Twitter feed I commented on to win the Singer book, but if it was one of your feeds, I thank you, wholeheartedly! It was truly a nice surprise when it arrived yesterday.
A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson (2005) is a lengthy poem written in iambic pentameter that follows the Petrarchan rhyme scheme. The poet goes on to explain that the poem, about the lynching of a 14-year-old boy in 1955, is written as a heroic crown of sonnets. This style consists of a sequence of fifteen interlinked sonnets in which the last sonnet is made up of the first lines of the fourteen sonnets that came before. As you can imagine, it is a huge undertaking.
Although beautiful, the sonnets are haunting and sad, filled with symbolic imagery created by the poet’s words. As a naturalist and environmental educator, I glommed on to the parts of the sonnets that contained plant life, birds, and other natural organisms and scenes.
Some of the words Nelson chose to use that resonated with me are:
