• Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Splay Anthem

Splay Anthem

Paperback

Poetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0811216527
ISBN13: 9780811216524
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: May 17 2006
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.48
Height: 0.45 Width: 6.06 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Awards: National Book Awards
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.

Also in

Poetry Criticism