Black Pastoral: Poems

By Ariana Benson and Willie Perdomo

Winner of the 2024 Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Finalist 2023 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize

Black Pastoral explores the complex duality of Black peoples’ past and present relationship with nature. It surveys the ways in which our histories (both Black histories and natural/ecological histories), our suffering and our thriving, are forever wound around one another. They are painful at times and act as a salve at others. Ariana Benson’s poems meditate upon the violence and tenderness that simultaneously characterize the entangling of the two, taking the form of a series of ecopoetic musings that re-envision these confluences.

Moreover, Benson’s poems illustrate the beauty inherent to Blackness, to nature, to the remarkable relationship they share, while also refusing its permission to collect idly, like an opaque skein of film obscuring uglier, necessary truths. Black Pastoral seeks to be both love letter and elegy, both flame to raze the field and flood to nourish the land anew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780820365190

Ariana Benson

ARIANA BENSON's poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. Recipient of the 2022 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, Benson serves as a nonfiction editor of Auburn Avenue Literary Journal. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Book preview

Winner of the 2022 Cave Canem Prize

Selected by Willie Perdomo

Inaugurated in 1999 with Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work, selected by Rita Dove, the Cave Canem Prize is an annual first-book award dedicated to the discovery of exceptional manuscripts of poetry by Black poets. Cave Canem is a nonprofit organization committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of Black poets. Founded by artists for artists, Cave Canem fosters community across the diaspora to enrich the field by facilitating a nurturing space to learn, experiment, create, and present. Cave Canem develops thoughtful audiences for Black voices that have worked and are working in the craft of poetry.

Black Pastoral

Black Pastoral POEMS

Ariana Benson

The University of Georgia Press

ATHENS

Published by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

© 2023 by Ariana Benson

All rights reserved

Designed by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

Set in 10/13.6 Quadraat OT Regular

Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed digitally

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Benson, Ariana, author. | Strange, Sharan, writer of foreword.

Title: Black pastoral : poems / Ariana Benson.

Other titles: Black pastoral (Compilation)

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2023] | Winner of the 2022 Cave Canem Prize; Selected by Willie Perdomo.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023016548 (print) | LCCN 2023016549

(ebook) | ISBN 9780820365183 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820365190 (epub) | ISBN 9780820365206 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Black people—Poetry. | Nature—Poetry. | LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3602.E68525 B58 2023 (print) | LCC PS3602.E68525 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23/ eng/20230503

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023016548

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023016549

for the Black South—our fruit strange & sweet

So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,

I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams

—ALICE MOORE DUNBAR-NELSON, Sonnet

why

is there under that poem always

an other poem?

—LUCILLE CLIFTON, surely i am able to write poems

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

by Sharan Strange

PROLOGUE

Love Poem in the Black Field

I. Black Pastoral

Epithalamion in the Wake

things tiny enough to fit through Elmina’s door of no return

Strange Fruit Market

Said the Tobacco to the Hand

Dear Moses Grandy . . . Love, the Great Dismal Swamp

Love Poem in the Black Field

Boll Weevil’s Theodicy

Elders Speak of the Windchimes

Etymology of Mercy

Love Poem in the Black Field

Cruel Ripening

II. Black Pastoral

Theodicy on My Blackness

Antipastoral: This Green and Pleasant Land

Love Poem in the Black Field

Self-Portrait as Oil Spill

How to Run Away

Anti-Elegy for the Trees

Rorschach After the Storm

Black Pastoral

Crown Shyness

Aubade After Earth

Still Life with Unidentified Flora

Love Poem in the Black Field

III. Black Pastoral

Still Life with Bouquet, Golden Spade (out of frame)

Baptism with Chiaroscuro

Hotbeds in Norfolk, Virginia

Game Theory

A Certain Sickness

Still Life with Tulip as Grenade

On Mars

Cloud Animals

No. 2 (No. 7 and No. 2): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1951

Love Poem in the Black Field

Sweet Field Anemoia

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. . . .

—Rumi

FOREWORD

the earth is a living thing

. . .

is a black and living thing

is a favorite child

of the universe

feel her rolling her hand