Description:
"Another Anti-Pastoral," the opening poem of Forest Primeval, confesses that sometimes "words fail." With a "bleat in [her] throat," the poet identifies with the voiceless and wild things in the composed, imposed peace of the Romantic poets with whom she is in dialogue. Vievee Francis's poems engage many of the same concerns as her poetic predecessors--faith in a secular age, the city and nature, aging, and beauty.
Review Quotes:
"Vievee Francis is a maker of magnificent, ferociously intelligent, deeply moving poems, but to me her poems are not just poems and this amazing book isn't just a book. Forest Primeval is a sacred conversation with the reader, wrestling with the distressing angel for all of us, and demanding a blessing." --Patrick Donnelly
"Some artists encounter a forest, a country landscape of overgrown grass and wild flowers, a stream teaming with fish, and don't simply see sunlight casting a holy gaze on a peaceful scene. Rather they are sensitive to the dark underbrush curling in the forest, the choked grass and flowers vying for space, the ravenous fish devouring a carcass. In Forest Primeval, Vievee Francis cannot look away from this more onerous view--from a landscape formed by the legacy of slavery, oppression, and violence against Black people and, especially, Black women. Fraught with images of confinement and degradation, the book creates a speaker who struggles for survival in a terrain pitted against her freedom. Yet the speaker is neither passive nor simply objectified and subjugated by these experiences; Forest Primeval captures her relentless drive to push through the forest, however deformed or changed it may make her after it transforms her." --Connotation Press