Customer Reviews

Black Swan (Pitt Poetry Series)

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Jump to titles that intrigue you or dedicate an hour or more to reading cover to cover - however you read this collection...it sings. Truly lyric poetry.

If you've got an ear, you'll appreciate the poems. If you've got any familiarity with mythology or Biblical stories, you'll appreciate the mind behind the poems as well.

So much of what good poetry should be is here: different voices and rhythms, familiar stories told from different angles, small sensory details forced into the foreground, pain, passion, hope, explorations of form...all without self-important posing, political posturing or self-righteous sermonizing.

Get it and read it.

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon redefines imagery. She laces simple experiences with such sentences of silver lining like in her piece Long Road, "your toenails painted silver, sprinkling like change on asphalt."

Her collection of poems in Black Swan explores identity. Van Clief-Stefanon is bold in her examinations, paralleling a coat of black spray paint to her black skin in "1. Brass Room". Her poems are simple yet thoughtful. One of my favorite poems 11:11 am reads to me like a prayer, "The first tree to change stopped you again in the bathroom this morning. Weeks you watched it turn: yellow, then fiery; brown too soon. Water running through copper pipes heating the house drowned out the sound of the creek below... Don't waste this wish."

Van Clief-Stefanon has mastered the art of juxtaposition between gripping imagery into undressed, real questions of identity. Her transitions are subtle enough to preserve the softness she so freely through her words, yet her deep poem parallels create beautiful contrasts in which she sews questions of identity.

Van Clief-Stefanon's words are chilling and truthful. In Groove, she talks of her fear of dirty dancing with men, "I pressed my palms against my partners back, pulled myself into his chest, close enough to wear my body into scar."

Van Clief-Stefanon even finds truth in the life of a night dancer, exploring the loneliness of living as a faceless individual.

Van Clief-Stefanon, through her brave questiong, pieces together the many beauties of life. And for this Black Swan will continue to be my bookshelf treasure.

Concerned with the growth of identity, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon's first book of poetry delves deeply into questions of sexuality, maturity, and ethnicity, loss, and salvation. By exploring what it means to be a black woman coming out of Florida in the 90's, her voice resonates with a fluent poignancy that all her readers can connect with. This book is a journey in three parts. In part one, Van Clief-Stefanon explores the loss of childhood innocence as the poet is taught to shame her body, and her budding sexuality. Part two looks for redemption in the Christian heritage of the Black community, but refuses to ignore the growing disconnect that comes from hypocrisy and riddles. In part three, the poet embraces her sexuality, refusing to ignore the hurts of the past, but looks for love, healing, and connectivity with others. In the last poem of the collection, entitled "Helen," Lyrae muses, "this is what I know about me:/ on sunny days I fall in love/ with my own shadow..." (57). She finds reconciliation possible.

A stimulating read, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon blends Classic Greek and Biblical narratives into her own poetry much like Derek Walcott's "Omeros," but without creating an overarching epic narrative. Whether Dinah, Daphne, the Concubine from Judges nineteen, or Helen, Van Clief-Stefanon dives into what it means to be a woman who speaks.

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon has talked about how each of her poetry books is conceptual; her second collection of poems, Open Interval, for instance, uses the mathematical idea of intervals to explore self-identity. If I were to state what her first collection was formulated around, then, I would likely say it is about the female experience in both past and present religious traditions and mythologies. The collection starts, for instance, with the line, "Imagine Leda black--," asking us to imagine "the god/swan's neck / draped around her neck / like a white noose." Many of the poems in this collection deal with rape, such as my favorite poem, entitled, "The Daughter and the Concubine from the Nineteenth Chapter of Judges Consider and Speak Their Minds." In this poem, Lyrae gives a voice to people typically voiceless, both in contemporary society and in traditional Biblical history. The poem is presented in two columns, with alternating voices between a girl observing a rape and the mistress whose master allows her to be gang raped and then later kills her. The poem ends with the dead mistress saying, "I am / not forsake / and no / war / will silence / my bones." The poem thus tells a traditionally masculine story from two female perspectives with very distinct voices, ending with the claim that, as sisters, "we / will sing / and we / will wail / and we / will shout. / Amen." The speakers thus redefine religion as a collective experience that enables, rather than silences, the female voice. Throughout the collection, then, the poems reimagine religious and sexual experience from a female perspective, ending with the story of Helen, who is fascinated with her own "shadow, / her bouncy gate," a girl who is a "chimera" with "wide black eyes" and who loves herself, even though others exploit and use her. In conclusion, I thought these poems were fabulous, full of imagery that distinct voices that reshape religious and sexual histories from a women's perspective, something that I think the world could use more of. I definitely recommend this to anyone interested in this particular topic and poetry in general, and I look forward to reading more of Lyrae's collections.