Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brand’s poetry has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. With a profound alertness that is attuned to this world and open to some other, possibly future, time and place, Brand’s ongoing labors of witness and imagination speak directly to where and how we live and reach beyond those worlds, their enclosures, and their violences.
Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems begins with a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the Time Being, in which Dionne Brand’s diaspora consciousness dismantles our quotidian disasters. In addition to this searing new work, Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Brand’s poetry published between 1982 and 2010 and includes a critical introduction by the literary scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe.
Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems features the searching and centering cantos of Primitive Offensive; the sharp musical conversations of Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia; and the documentary losses of revolutions in Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, in which “The street was empty/with all of us standing there.” No Language Is Neutral reads language, coloniality, and sexuality as a nexus. Land to Light On writes intimacies and disaffections with nation, while in thirsty a cold-eyed flâneur surveys the workings of the city. In Inventory, written during the Gulf Wars, the poet is “the wars’ last and late night witness,” her job is not to soothe but to “revise and revise this bristling list/hourly.” Ossuaries’ futurist speaker rounds out the collection and threads multiple temporal worlds—past, present, and future.
This masterwork displays Dionne Brand’s ongoing body of thought—trenchant, lyrical, absonant, discordant, and meaning-making. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems is classic and living, a record of one of the great writers of our age.
- Cover
- Contents
- Introduction by Christina Sharpe
- Nomenclature for the Time Being
- Primitive Offensive
- Canto I
- Canto II
- Canto III
- Canto IV
- Canto V
- Canto VI
- Canto VII
- 1513, Havana
- Canto VIII
- Canto IX
- Canto X
- Canto XI
- Canto XII
- Canto XIII
- Canto XIV
- Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal Indefense of Claudia
- Wintere Pigrams
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36. For Filomena Maria
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40. Reading the Corporate Pages
- 41. Dec. 18th–20th, 1982
- 42
- 43
- 44. Charles Fowler—1981
- 45.—winter suicide—
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- Epigrams To Ernesto Cardenal In Defense Of Claudia
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33. Ars Poetica
- 34. Ars Poetica (II)
- 35. Ars Poetica (III) ‘on being told that being Black is being bitter’
- 36
- 37
- 38. For Grenada
- 39
- 40. Imitation of Cardenal
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- Chronicles of the Hostile Sun
- Languages
- Night—Mt. Panby Beach—25 March 1983
- Calibishie—April 1983
- Carifuna
- To Roseau
- Vieux Fort: St Lucia
- La Souffriere
- For Martin Carter
- At a cocktail party
- On eavesdropping on a delegation of conventioners at Barbados Airport
- Eurocentric
- Sieges
- Amelia
- I am not that strong woman
- Amelia continued . . .
- Anti-poetry
- Military Occupations
- Diary—The Grenada crisis
- October 19th, 1983
- October 25th, 1983
- October 26th, 1983
- October 27th, 1983
- October 27th, 1983—evening
- After . . .
- On American numeracy and literacy in the war against Grenada
- P.S. Amelia
- P.P.S. Grenada
- Old Pictures of the New World
- For Stuart
- 5th anniversary
- “. . . Over the radio I hear the victory bulletins of the scum of the earth . . .”
- No Language Is Neutral
- Hard Against the Soul I
- Return
- return I
- Phyllis
- Jackie
- return II
- Amelia still
- Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater
- No Language is Neutral
- Hard Against The Soul
- Land to Light On
- I Have Been Losing Roads
- I i Out here I am like someone without a sheet
- I ii If you come out and you see nothing recognisable,
- I iii I lift my head in the cold and I get confuse.
- I iv I look at that road a long time.
- I v All I could do was turn and go back to the house
- II i Out here, you can smell indifference driving
- II ii I have to think again what it means that I am here,
- II iii I know as this thing happens, a woman
- II iv no wonder I could get lost here, no wonder
- II v A comet, slow and magnificent, drapes the north sky
- III i In the middle of afternoons driving north
- III ii Where is this. Your tongue, gone cold, gone
- III iii Look, let me be specific. I have been losing roads
- III iv One gleeful headline drives me to the floor, kneeling,
- III v After everything I rely on confusion. I listen for
- All that Has Happened Since
- IV i Arani, I meet my old friend at Arani. Arani is a piece of what
- IV ii in the middle of traffic at Church and Gerrard I notice someone,
- IV iii a Sunday, soft as any, plays with its eyelash,
- IV iv I saw three Sikh men early the next morning, the avenue wind
- IV v the girl starts the morning too, ragged like years
- IV vi a Baptist priestess preaches to a sidewalk in this city
- IV vii 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. she worked years leaving them in this apartment
- IV viii in Chechnya, a Russian plane has dropped a bomb on a village
- IV ix what exactly is the difference between these groups, perplexed
- IV x here is the history of the body;
- IV xi That damn corridor, green with half dead guerrillas
- IV xii why this voice rank and ready to be called bitter again, liquor
- IV xiii for only one moment it spreads on the table like water
- Land to Light On
- V i Maybe this wide country just stretches your life to a thinness
- V ii But the sight of land has always baffled you,
- V iii I am giving up on land to light on, it’s only true, it is only
- V iv This those slaves must have known who were my mothers, skin
- V v I’m giving up on land to light on, slowly, it isn’t land,
- V vi Light passes through me lightless, sound soundless,
- Dialectics
- VI i I feel like my aunt hunkered to a foot that wouldn’t
- VI ii I had thought my life wider, had counted on my cleverness
- VII i I took in the child sucking her thumb, holding on to the butter
- VII ii Their laughter here where laughter is to
- VII iii I saw her head up the road toward
- VII iv I took no time in the rose light of
- VII v Her burning head, not just how they
- VIII i once they take we to a dance, the both of
- VIII ii that night we wanted to fly in our aunts’ skin
- VIII iii She came later, weeks, months, said she was sick
- VIII iv She came in a hurry to leave, “Keep the children
- VIII v that night we wanted to fly into our aunts’ skins
- IX i god I watched you all, watched and watched and in the end
- IX ii If I could think of what I’d meant again, and seas; I never
- X In the church yard which was the cemetery, the savannah
- XI no I do not long, long, slowly for the past.
- XII Out of them. To where? As if I wasn’t them.
- Islands Vanish
- XIII In this country where islands vanish, bodies submerge,
- Through My Im Perfect Mouth and Life and Way
- XIV i I know you don’t like poems, especially mine
- XIV ii And no I did not know you, who could? choosing
- XIV iii I had hoped that she could see me, hoped
- Every Chapter of the World
- XV today then, her head is thudding
- Thirsty
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII
- IX
- X
- XI
- XII
- XIII
- XIV
- XV
- XVI
- XVII
- XVIII
- XIX
- XX
- XXI
- XXII
- XXIII
- XXIV
- XXV
- XXVI
- XXVII
- XXVIII
- XXIX
- XXX
- XXXI
- XXXII
- XXXIII
- Inventory
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- Ossuaries
- Ossuary I
- Ossuary II
- Ossuary III
- Ossuary IV
- Ossuary V
- Ossuary VI
- Ossuary VII
- Ossuary VIII
- Ossuary IX
- Ossuary X
- Ossuary XI
- Ossuary XII
- Ossuary XIII
- Ossuary XIV
- Ossuary XV
- Noes
- Acknowledgements
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