Sturge Town

Poems

By: Kwame Dawes

Narrated by: Kwame Dawes

In this stunning volume, acclaimed poet Kwame Dawes explores the mythic, ancestral, and spiritual journeys that make up a life.

The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes’s family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States.

The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality, and engages in an intimate dialogue with the listener—serious, confessional, alarmed, and sometimes teasing. Metrically careful and sonorous, these poems engage in a personal dialogue with the listener, serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualized spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys.

Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry.

©2023 Kwame Dawes (P)2024 University of Nebraska Press