Customer Reviews

Ejo: Poems, Rwanda, 1991-1994 (Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry)

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Derik Burleson's brave and terrifying book about genocide in Rwanda broke my heart.As a PCV in the seventies, I knew many of the places he loved, Lake Kivu, Virunga National Park, and the touristy visit to the gorillas who seemed bored with pounding their chests. Burleson's poems remind this reader of the pain of growing to love a country, then seeing its people destroyed in a bloodbath. Worse yet, destroying one another. One tribe played off against another, thanks to the Belgians and their colonial preference for the Tutsis' aquiline features. His use of imagery seems to draw all of nature into the violence,"the pale and carniiverous orchids," the chameleon's tongue "like a bullwhip," "the thin-featured woman/who sold bright fruit door to door,"--now gone. And everywhere men "fingering their machetes" and bloated bodies in the lakes and rivers. Burleson's use of African folktale, as in the woman who can turn herself into a hyena("Nyavirezi"), is charged with premonitions of what is to come. Most powerful of all for this reader were the Remera poems, written from an African point of view, and recounting sorrow after sorrow. Burleson draws on every poem he ever read, and every moment he spent in Africa, and maybe every experience he had as a human being to write this book and help us to understand what happened, and how it happened.

This is a strong book of poems. It is particularly interesting to me as a linguist. Remera's poems echo the origins of language in a fascinating way. Burlesson is on to something fundamentally human with this work. These are images that CNN never brought to us.

Burleson's poems keep pulling me back with thier elegance, their depth of vision and their travels through human existence. I am thankful that he has the courage to write these poems.

With terrifying grace and measured telling, Derick Burleson brings us what none of us, despite the news, could know from the Rwandan genocide--how "the cows of the dead are counted," how "mourners shave their heads and keen," how "the only water she found/ was a puddle in a thorn tree's hollow stump./ It didn't quench her thirst./ It was lion piss." Understatement and restraint bring this book into its power as a necessary book to set beside the other volumes that have brought us poems concerning the most severe atrocities of our time. Like Reznikoff's "Holocaust" with its ferocious accuracy and detail, Burleson take us into the landscape of a human life, a human face, and shows how, by our own hands, it suffers. A hard, true book.

Burleson uses language - standard and idiomatic English with occasional lapses into French and Kinyarwandan - as a painter manipulates color; blending and texturing until you can see and feel and taste his Rawandan experience. His mature voice and steady hand cast him as an expert witness to life before, during and after the massacre. I have not often experienced so deep an emotion divorced from experience. Ejo defines that phenomenon.