Poems of the American South [Hardcover]

This one-of-a-kind collection of poems about the American South ranges over four centuries of its dramatic history.

The arc of poetry of the South, from slave songs to Confederate hymns to Civil War ballads, from Reconstruction turmoil to the Agrarian movement to the dazzling poetry of the New South, is richly varied and historically vibrant. No other region of the United States has been as mythologized as the South, nor contained as many fascinating, beguiling, and sometimes infuriating contradictions.Poems of the American Southincludes poems both by Southerners and by famous observers of the South who hailed from elsewhere. These range from Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Francis Scott Key through Langston Hughes, Robert Penn Warren, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey, and Donald Justice, and include a host of living poets as well: Wendell Berry, Rita Dove, Sandra Cisneros, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, C. D. Wright, Natasha Trethewey, and many more. Organized thematically, the anthology places poems from past centuries in fruitful dialogue with a diverse array of modern voices who are redefining the South with a verve that is reinvigorating American poetry as a whole.Foreword
 
SONGS OF FREEDOM
Bound for Canaan Land
Nobody Knows de Trouble I’ve Had
The Good Old Way
Go to Sleep
 
LOOKOUTS
Hart Crane, Southern Cross
Langston Hughes, The South
Rita Dove, Reverie in Open Air
Natasha Trethewey, Pastoral
 
TAR HEEL AND PALMETTO
Francis Scott Key, Defence of Fort McHenry
A. R. Ammons, Easter Morning
Lucille Clifton, at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989
Kathryn Stripling Byer, Night Fishing
Atsuro Riley, Diorama
 
CRITTERS
Sidney Lanier, The Mocking Bird
Madison Cawein, The Whippoorwill
Donald Justice, Southern Gothic
James Dickey, The Heaven of Animals
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