Black Pastoral: Poems
By Ariana Benson and Willie Perdomo
5/5
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About this ebook
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.
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.
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Black Pastoral - Ariana Benson
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