Splay Anthem

Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections--Braid, Fray, and Nub (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub)--Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu (though Mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou).

In the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are progenitor spirits, and the song of the Andoumboulou is a song addressed to the spirits, a funeral song, a song of rebirth. Mu, too, splays with meaning: muni bird, Greek muthos, a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Mira painting, Mackey's poems trace the lost tribe of we through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth's music, spirit lift.

Author: Nathaniel Mackey
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 05/17/2006
Pages: 112
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.48lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.06w x 0.45d
ISBN: 9780811216524


Award: National Book Awards - Winner


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/03/2006 pg. 40
Library Journal 08/15/2006 pg. 91
Library Journal 08/01/2006 pg. 91
Library Journal 04/15/2007 pg. 90
Black Issues Book Review 03/01/2007 pg. 18

About the Author
Mackey, Nathaniel: - Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida in 1947. He is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, and has received many awards for his work, including the National Book Award in poetry for Splay Anthem, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, and the Bollingen Prize from the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Mackey is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University, and edits the literary journal Hambone.