To grapple with the history of Black America, Roger Reeves, in his second collection of poems, Best Barbarian, recasts traditional (whitewashed) American history and the literature of Harold Bloom’s Western Canon, retelling stories from perspective of the Other, the barbarian, returning the word to its simpler definition (“a person from an alien land, culture, or group believed to be inferior, uncivilized, or violent”) while amplifying its accumulated connotations. Here we find the best barbarian given voice, heart, aura.
If Black Americans have equaled barbarian throughout the history of the American nation, Reeves seems to say, let them be other — named, claimed, and shown plainly in this 21st century. In a complicated poetry that contends with racism, myth, and the current moment, Reeves’ lines are infused with cadences that range from hip hop to the biblical, into a register all his own:
As in everywhere the bucks went clattering
The police bristled in the way
As in form forgets fugitivity is the original human
Form as in best put on your best barbarian
As in this gospel is large enough
That anything can be said about me and you
Your momma and your cousin too
Rolling down the strip on Vogues
Waking up slamming Cadillac doors Outkast
And out of gas the empire smiles in its guillotine
And Gucci loafers
As if to say ‘I practice the abundance of zero’
(“Rich Black, or Best Barbarian”)
Formally, the notes he hits draw from an ecstatic (in the religious sense) and prophetic line traced back to Hopkins and Whitman, reliant on alliteration and tonal inflection, and recall the intimate eloquence of James Baldwin who makes cameo appearances in several poems. Throughout, the poems also reflect the music of Reeves’ generation, in lyrics (above) from Outkast and other references (for example, one in “Without the Pelt of a Lion” in which Beyoncé takes the place of Homer’s Muse: “sing Beyoncé, of the burning / Heaven, and hurricanes and the little graves / That rise after, and the big graves” — that evokes her song “Formation”). Reeves’ poems are accumulative, so that one is afraid of losing the resonant balance of the whole when excerpting.
As the title suggests, Best Barbarian is a book full of so-called monsters, or monsters who provide a foil for others — the monster from the great Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, Grendel, appears in “Grendel,” but becomes intertwined with the image of James Baldwin — Black activist, ex-pat, openly gay and of the changing world of civil rights America. Even as his poems open a scene, Reeves is always attentive to that fleeting detail, that imperceptible moment of strength and wonder, in this case as a young Baldwin becoming baptized, swept up in the fervor of the church:
All lions must lean into something other than a roar:
James Baldwin, for instance, singing Precious Lord
His voice as weary as water broken over his scalp
In a storefront Sanctified Church’s baptismal pool.
All those years ago when he wanted to be
Somebody’s child and on fire in that being. Lord,
I want to be somebody’s child and chosen
Water spilling over their scalp, water
Taking the shape of their longing, a deer
Diving into the evening traffic and the furrow drawn
In the air over the hood of the car — power
And wanting to be something alive and open.
The risk and danger inherent in the speaker’s identification are clear — both with Baldwin and the deer diving into traffic. But Reeves looks closer at Baldwin, and moves deeper into personal response and experience:
I am calling to that grain
Of light, to that gap between his teeth
Where the many-of-us fatherless sleep
And bear and be whatever darkness or leaping
Thing we can be.
The poem gathers much of the power Reeves craves from its sprung rhythms. Reeves, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, believes in the logic of sound: “And bear and be whatever darkness or leaping / Thing we can be,” leaning on the internal rhymes as well as the end rhymes, with a stealthy assonance and consonance running throughout (think “The Windhover”: “My heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird). These are poems of insistent, powerful voice, in lines that enact light, or fire.
The poem turns to Reeves’ “heart in hiding,” and to the tragedy of Grendel, killed by Beowulf, as he reinterprets the epic poem. In his account, he says what if they got it wrong, and misunderstood Grendel the monster’s motivation, misinterpreted the barbarian? Yet he already knows how the narrative ends and seemingly always must end:
… In James Baldwin’s mouth,
My difficult beauty, my weak and worn,
My future as any number of angels,
Which is not unlike the beast, Grendel,
Coming out of the wild heaven into the hills
And halls of the mead house at the harpist’s call
With absolute prophecy in his breast
And a desire for mercy, for a friend, an end
To drifting in loneliness, and in that coming
Down out of the hills, out of the trees, for once,
Bringing humans the best vision of themselves,
Which, of course, must be slaughtered.
These are poems of consistent familial tragedy, or of fear of such tragedy. Reeves, as his poems make clear, is a new father, and references to his young daughter appear variously.
Poems like this coexist with ones that take on the racist stories of American history, in what has been told from generation to generation, and who does the telling. The poem “American Landscaping, Philadelphia to Mount Vernon” begins with the chintzy décor of a front lawn, comprised of swan planters, a Virgin Mary, and a lawn jockey, all in the same vicinity. Mary gazes down towards the jockey, gesturing in a way that suggests she is “restoring Race back to its place in God after / Winter makes heathen the heaven of horticulture. / This is America calling:”
Scope widens, as the image sparks a historical memory — to “Jocko Graves, the slave / Of General Washington, who froze to death / Enfolded in snow on the banks of the Delaware River, / His lantern out in front of him awaiting his master’s return,” whose name and pose aid the associative leap. In this way, Graves’ story blends into the image of the cheap plastic Black jockey, since Washington established a monument in his honor: “Even in death, a slave must / Labor.” Reeves does this throughout the book, moving from the private moment to the social or political one and returning, reflecting the as-yet still invisible history carried by so many Black Americans.
“American Landscaping, Philadelphia to Mount Vernon” ends with a focus on Reeves, turns to first love and the breaking of the barriers imposed through history: “Only in America will the sons and daughters of slaves / Kiss the sons and daughters of their masters / And remember it as an opportunity to be human.” It is the angle and the irony of these moments (in their “opportunity” for the human to be human) — and in their inclusion of the “I” — that give the poems their heft.
Sound and love blend Reeves’ internal logic in other poems, such as “In Rehearsal for the Funeral” which deals with new life and new death:
My daughter, barely
One, lifted over the edge of my father’s
Casket — at the edge of my father’s teeth.
All handling after death is done at the edge
Of teeth — the locust undoing the earth
To yell from the trees, and the rain, the rain,
And the smoke, smoke — and has not charity
Or light willing to light the windows
Or my father in his death, begging,
A child begging, begging to be born.
Reeves trusts in the logical consistency of insistence, of emotion and the sound of emotion in a voice both prophetic and transcendent. This is true in his earlier collection, King Me, but in this new collection, the stories are arguably fuller, the focus of the book sharper.
Despite his heady, learned subject matter (you don’t need to be well-versed in ancient epic poems, contemporary poetry, lyrics, or history to enjoy this book, and Reeves provides detailed notes on the more obscure poems in the back, but familiarity with the texts and names that are his springboards is helpful), this is a book concerned with and dedicated to children — the child Reeves was, that Baldwin was, the schoolgirls who died in the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and Emmett Till and George Floyd — but also to the children of the American moment 60-some years post-civil rights era, including his own young daughter. In “Children Listen,” below in full, Reeves both laments and rejoices, and with this poem, his book, like his changed Iliad (in “Without the Pelt of a Lion”: “Rage: Sing, Goddess, of the on-top-of-love / And the president’s chronic angers, his mouth, a burning/Bird of prey”) becomes invocation:
It turns out however that I was deeply
Mistaken about the end of the world
The body in flames will not be the body
In flames but just a house fire ignored
The black sails of that solitary burning
Boat rubbing along the legs of lovers
Flung into a Roman sky by a carousel
The lovers too sick in their love
To notice a man drenched in fire on a porch
Or a child aflame mistaken for a dog
Mistaken for a child running to tell of a bomb
That did not knock before it entered
In Gaza with its glad tidings of abundant joy
In Kazimierz a god is weeping
In a window one golden hand raised
Above his head as if he’s slipped
On the slick rag of the future our human
Kindnesses unremarkable as the flies
Rubbing their legs together while standing
On a slice of cantaloupe Children
You were never meant to be human
You must be the grass
You must grow wildly over the graves
This is the tenor of so many of these poems, which calls someone forward, gives them a charge, and sends them on; here with whispers of Whitman’s prophetic “Song of Myself,” the children are the grass, the Other, the Best Barbarian. They are also fire — both the fire next time (prophesized in the bible) and the fire already — each one aflame in an already burning world. In the charge Reeves lays down, he holds behind him the violent past of Black history (perhaps all history — not “all lives matter,” but Reeves includes Gaza and Krakow in his vision), and projects its future. His final words in “For Black Children at the End of the World — and at the Beginning” are both personal and universal, and for that future:
Black Child, you are the walking-on-of-water
Without the need of an approving master.
You are in a beautiful language.
You are what lies beyond this kingdom
And the next and the next and fire. Fire, Black Child.
[Published by W.W.Norton on March 22, 2022, 128 pages, $26.95 hardcover]