Letters from the Black Ark
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Rhythmic lyrical poems that embody black music, existence, and tragedy.
The poems in this collection center on the word “dub,” which accrues a subtle lyrical connotation throughout its various forms and meanings—to bestow, vest, crown, and also to suspend, reverb, echo, and sever. Dub poetry plays with revealing and concealing, while also pointing the way to the conditions that produce black poetic music. In D.S. Marriott’s poetry, tragic catastrophes of current black existence—London knife crime, the Windrush scandal, Grenfell, and deadly race violence—are portrayed as questions of language. To speak this language, as Marriott’s poem show, is to take on the forces that cause rupture. Throughout these poems of loss, exile, and obliteration, the poet foresees his downfall and metamorphosis, ultimately realizing too late that he cannot transcend the reverberations and echoes laden with black social death.
The poems in this collection center on the word “dub,” which accrues a subtle lyrical connotation throughout its various forms and meanings—to bestow, vest, crown, and also to suspend, reverb, echo, and sever. Dub poetry plays with revealing and concealing, while also pointing the way to the conditions that produce black poetic music. In D.S. Marriott’s poetry, tragic catastrophes of current black existence—London knife crime, the Windrush scandal, Grenfell, and deadly race violence—are portrayed as questions of language. To speak this language, as Marriott’s poem show, is to take on the forces that cause rupture. Throughout these poems of loss, exile, and obliteration, the poet foresees his downfall and metamorphosis, ultimately realizing too late that he cannot transcend the reverberations and echoes laden with black social death.
D.S. Marriott is the author of Before Whiteness, Lacan Noir, Whither Fanon?, and Hoodoo Voodoo. His poetry has appeared in Chicago Review, PoetryLondon, LosAngeles Review of Books, Snow, Brooklyn Rail, Poetry Review, and Paris Review. He currently lives in Atlanta, where he is the Charles T. Winship Professor of Philosophy at Emory University.