Customer Reviews

Jonestown and Other Madness: Poetry

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I would have given more stars but I was really disappointed because the author and poetess, Pat Parker, only wrote one poem about Jonestown. There was a lot more to Jonestown than just one poem. Since she lived in Oakland during the time of November 18, 1978, she could have personalized the experience more than a poem. She could have remembered one of the victims especially the children, men, and women who died so needlessly and senselessly. I am sure her community was traumatically hit but I didn't feel it in the writings.

I also felt that the author cared more about her personal situation as an African American lesbian in urban America even in the early 1980s after Jonestown, and the senseless murders of Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk only 9 days after Jonestown. I don't recall reading anything about them.

I didn't care for her style of poetry which was quite angry, frustrated, and overwrought with fire for her own personal gain. No, I don't think I would have recommended this book to others but I wanted to read more about Jonestown and I didn't get that much more from Pat Parker in this book.

My rating of this book is really more 3.5 stars. I just felt that I had to offset the only other review of this book (which is angry and ignorant).

Pat Parker was a black Lesbian activist poet who lived in Oakland during the sixties and seventies among the hundreds of folks who would later go off to form the ill-fated Jonestown community.

But, as Ms. Parker states in her introduction, the poems are not primarily about that tragic event (a few are) but are inspired by the media treatment of Jonestown and how people process the "normal madness" that surrounds us.

Having said that, this book of free verse is not the best book of poems I've ever read. I'm not a scholar or academic (or even much of a poet) so I can't speak to the book on that level. It's just that few of the poems hit me on a gut level--which is the main reason I read poetry (that and poems are short). But I did appreciate poet's voice--being neither Black, queer, nor female, I found it enlightening.

If you are at all interested in the voices of oppressed people you should give Pat Parker a look.

BTW Pat Parker has a library named after her in New York City.

If I had wanted a book of poetry I would've bought something from Frost, Emerson, or Dickinson, not some unknown author that had a really "bad" idea of having people write poems, or "short stories" about the Jonestown tragedy! Yeah it was sad, but I wanted the hard facts about who, what, when, where, and why this happened, not some crappy prose. NOT WORTH THE MONEY! Sorry if you were one of the contributors of this book, but really it sucked! The title was especially misleading! I thought I was getting some great book about what happened!