Navigating poetic traditions.(3 books on poetry)(Book Review)

Becoming Ebony by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003, 79 pp., paper.

Swimming with Dolphins by Adrian Oktenberg. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002, 105 pp., $19.95 hardcover.

I Will Say Beauty by Carol Frost. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003, 79 pp., $14.95 paper.

So I come out screaming," writes the Liberian poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley in her remarkable second book Becoming Ebony, in the very first poem, "My Birth at the Doorpost":

 
   So I come out screaming, head 
   first, the way they 
   wished me out. If they had asked 
   me, I would 
   have come out legs first, then 
   hands before head. 
   So I can run away from home 
   someday. (p. 3) 

Thus are announced all the major themes of this book: flight and displacement and the fraughtness of the idea of "home" for this exile; gender and a constant sense of the sustaining but difficult presence of strong matriarchal figures (the "they" of the poem, many of whom are standing in attendance at the birth); and the reluctance of the speaker to find easy answers to anything.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley was born in Tugbakeh, Liberia, and was raised in Monrovia before the devastating civil war that brought to power the notoriously bloody Charles Taylor. Her first book, Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa, is about her experiences in that war; Becoming Ebony is more concerned with the before and after--the life of her childhood and her life now, in Michigan, as a teacher and wife and mother of teenagers.

What is so unusual about this book is its resolute refusal to gloss over the difficulties of this biography, its emotional contradictions. In a fearless, powerful, inventive narrative voice, Wesley lets us know that her pre-war childhood was not paradise; that her adulthood is not…