5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Vision and the Music, November 6, 2003
This review is from: Ostinato Vamps: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)
OSTINATO VAMPS is a gloriously ambitious book. Taken together, its poems form a visionary history of black, white, brown, and beige. Similar to the speaker in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," the "I" in these poems is a conduit for voices from the ancient past, the 19th century, the noir 40s of big band swing, the 50s of hipster bebop, and contemporary America. This is art as history redeemed: "aesthetics is the science of vulnerability/ bruises transformed, wounds immortalized..." Coleman is a virtuoso of many styles, laying down Thelonious Monk or Miles Davis, Robert Johnson or Billie Holiday, and sometimes rap or gospel. In a gorgeous poem called "Plum Hunger," she manages to merge W. C. Williams and Duke Ellington. There are people who still think Renaissance music should cue the rhythm of our poems. Coleman demonstrates that true American prosody is based on our native music. This is an important book. Do not miss it.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The beat of a different drummer, January 31, 2004
This review is from: Ostinato Vamps: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)
[ostinato]: a musical figure repeated persistently at the same pitch throughout a composition. -- Webster
Wanda Coleman has been dubbed the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles and with OSTINATO VAMPS she continues the traits that have been her hallmark for more than three decades. Her style is lyrically breathtaking as she repeatedly weaves voices and snippets of blues lyrics into poetic expressions that focus on the human struggle. Her words do both, explore familiar territory and shatter stereotypes, but her fidelity to the truth is buffered by the syncopated way she delivers. The poetry and prose possess a soaring openness and a biting wit, where socially imposed fate begins to burn in the reader's mind at the indifference of humankind. The empty sadness in the title 'Olio Intaglio', where a mother is left to suffer alone over the loss of her son, touches on how family and friends can be the cruelest of them all.
One caption refers to her as the poet with a warrior voice because of her inclination to peel away polite veneer and verbally dissect the heart of issues. She artfully reminds us that life is unfair, but it still belongs to the living. If you have a penchant for poetry that is rhythmic but not rhyming, that reaches to the core of a psycho-social America, I recommend OSTINATO VAMPS. It invites the mind to venture beyond its comfort zone.
Reviewed by aNN
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating and Complex Urban Poet, July 13, 2004
This review is from: Ostinato Vamps: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)
In this book, I'm talking back the rhythms that were stolen from my people. Our society has suppressed the spirit of African Americans, yet when I look around me and in the media, everybody is walking, talking and singing like black people. ~Wanda Coleman
Wanda Coleman's poems are wildly complex in form and I will admit to only understanding about a third of the hidden meanings. As I read her poems I am walking down dark streets when suddenly I turn a page and I am suddenly at home with a series of words. Then, I am thrown into a word maze again where words like odalisque, pandemic and narcoleptic pull my eyes hungrily across the pages of hurricane thoughts.
Wanda is known as an Urban Poet who has a love for unvarnished truth. She comments on everything from politics to hot love. Her poems dance with their own rhythm and are especially beautiful when she lets her goddess out to play. She is known for being one of the nation's best poet-performers.
While the complexity is inspiring and Wanda's use of words, stunning...I was so happy to find my way to the humor in "The History of My Body." Deep emotions dance between her words and sometimes she blatantly expresses inner torments like when she writes: "I have wrung my heart/in secret silence." At times her words seem to roll in hot lust or spring from the page in a mind jolting punch.
Wanda's poems inspire me to write and write. I write my own poems after reading her poems and I am amazed at how such complexity inspires my own awakening to myself. I understand her musings on some primal level where poets sometimes live but at times her language flies above me and I can't grasp at the meaning no matter how much I try. Sometimes I am so pleased to understand an entire poem and then I can wander through pages before enlightenment strikes again.
By the time I arrived at "Soul Traveler" I was writing my own poems. That is how much this book inspired me.
The poems are challenging and interesting and the vocabulary and visual images are just stunning:
...in rainbow-colored moss. There she thrived in volcanic
radiance & iridescent splendor yet she pined for
another world made steel by her false imaginings & in
the pitch of her moonless golden-apple grove she danced
her dissatisfactions amongst ghosts...
To write this way! What a dream.
~The Rebecca Review
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