My Father's Geography (Pitt Poetry Series)

My Father's Geography (Pitt Poetry Series)

"Weaver's life studies and lyrics are imbued with a vivid sense of language, a vivid sense of the world, a vivid sense of their inseparability. And his tonal range―from unabashed passion to the subtlest velleity―is impressive indeed. This is a singular talent."―Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Weaver's life studies and lyrics are imbued with a vivid sense of language, a vivid sense of the world, a vivid sense of their inseparability. And his tonal range―from unabashed passion to the subtlest velleity―is impressive indeed. This is a singular talent. ― Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Weaver is an outstanding new voice in African American poetry, the most lyrical writer to emerge this decade, a man who writes with rural and urban idioms that give us a truly new American poetry. ― Dr. James V. Hatch, Hatch-Billops Collection Weaver is expanding the great tradition in American parlance and song. He strives for the deep resonance of American Grand Opera, in the Whitman tradition. One of his sources for inspiration are the Big Bands, his father's and mine. His poems expand the rhythm section, "straight talk" from ancestry and remembrance. His poems are incremental revelations, his own poetic music. It is a fine rhetorical striving, undiminished. ― Michael S. Harper Weaver's life studies and lyrics are imbued with a vivid sense of language, a vivid sense of the world, a vivid sense of their inseparability. And his tonal range―from unabashed passion to the subtlest velleity―is impressive indeed. This is a singular talent.―Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Afaa Michael Weaver is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Timber and Prayer : The Indian Pond Poems ; My Father’s Geography ; The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 ; The Government of Nature , winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award ; and City of Eternal Spring , winner of the Phyllis Wheatley Book Award. He is alumnae professor of English at Simmons College in Boston. Weaver is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, a Pew fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Fulbright scholar appointment, among other honors. In 1998, he became the first Elder of the Cave Canem Foundation.