Book Review: "The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde" by Audre Lorde

 

5/5 stars

*Spoiler alert!*

“History is not kind to us

We restitch it with living

Past memory forward

Into desire

Into the panic”

I have finally read Audre Lorde and I am kicking myself that it took this long! What a treasure I was missing out on. Black feminist queer icon and civil rights activist Audre Lorde has a writing style that is searing, incisive, yet lyrical and graceful. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde gives readers access to almost all of her work in one powerful volume of activist poetry that blends the real with the mythical.

Throughout the volume, we experience history as seen contemporaneously by her, such as the struggle to overthrow the apartheid regime in South Africa and the civil rights fight in America. Even though she is no longer with us (she passed in 1992), her poetry echoes presciently, hauntingly with our present moment, where issues of destructive foreign policy, racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination are not ghosts but are still with us.

She wrestles with historical legacy in a very astute way in the many different ways that patriarchal societies mythologize women—fitting them squarely within archetypes such as healer, nurturer, Mother Bear, etc. without recognizing their complicated humanity—that are no longer with us: 

“What do we want from each other

After we have told our stories

Do we want

To be healed do we want

Mossy quiet stealing over our scars

Do we want

The powerful unfrightening sister

Who will make the pain go away

Mother’s voice in the hallway

You’ve done it right

The first time darling

You will never need

To do it again”

I adore the clarity with which Lorde sees the world in all its ugliness and its beauty all at once. Another of my favorites was her cosmic perspective, in which she contemplates if life is out there and takes an unsparing look at what exactly humanity is literally broadcasting out into the universe. Some of which is culture that I was not alive for, well over thirty years ago, still making its way out into the stars. This was around the time the Voyager probes were being launched (in 1977) with the Golden Record, which was a curated selection of human languages, animal sounds, and music.

I enjoyed the contrast between the deliberateness of how we are representing our species in the Golden Record in contrast with the impulsive, unfiltered release of radio waves containing various TV shows and the legal scandals of the day (Watergate, McCarthy, etc.). How is anyone out there making a judgment about humanity when presented with these two contradicting narratives? What judgment comes out of that?

“Don’t make waves

Is good advice

From a leaky boat

 

One light year is the distance

One ray of light can travel in one year and

Thirty

Light years away from earth

In our infinitely offended universe

Of waiting

An electronic cloud announces our presence

Finally

To the unimpressible stars

 

This is straight from a Scientific American

On the planet earth

Our human signature upon the universe

Is an electronic cloud

Of expanding 30-year-old television programs

Like Howdy Doody Arthur Godfrey

Uncle Miltie and Hulahoops

Quiz shows and wrestling midgets

Baseball

The McCarthy hearings and Captain Kangaroo

 

Now I don’t know what

A conscious universe might be

But it is interesting to wonder

What will wave back

To all that” 

Overall, I found this poetry volume powerful and wonderful, exploring topics like everyday life to the cosmic perspective of humanity’s place in the universe. Audre Lorde is one of the most fearless, vulnerable poets I have ever read. No one can go wrong with reading The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. I hope it resonates with you as it resonated with me.

Happy reading!

--BookOwl