![]() I felt I knew this man because he looked like me. Jim, obviously a long way from being even thirty years old, stood almost shyly in a peacoat, looking as if having his picture taken would never be one of the things he would get used to doing. Perhaps it was because their photos were those of seasoned, established, older writers. Standing in the bookstore aisle, I had a growing feeling that I knew that man in the photograph in a way that I had not years earlier when seeing pictures of James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison on the backs of their books. And on the back, a black-and-white stamp-sized photograph of Jim, as I, a graduate student, would come to know him, more than ten years later at the University of Virginia. And because Dinand Library at the Cross was still several months away from being a place I, a black sophomore at a predominantly white school, could comfortably go and know that I could find something familiar, I went once more to the bookstore.įamiliar, then, was what I began to feel when I came upon the paperback Hue and Cry on the store’s shelf. The literary world beyond America was still a generally new one to me, still a feast of rich, though unfamiliar food, as it were. It was not that I had not been pleasantly, wonderfully nourished by such authors, but I had spent my teenage years in Washington, D.C., primarily devouring American writers, black and white. I had come to find something to read beyond the nineteenth-century British novels of the course I was taking. I FIRST MET JAMES ALAN MCPHERSON in the Holy Cross College bookstore in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1969. If, for example, a man comes upon a dead body and omits to raise the hue, he commits an amerciable offense, besides laying himself open to ugly suspicions. We read them with delight: poems that spin, dance, leap, and generate insight continuously.When a felony is committed, the hue and cry ( hutesium et clamor) should be raised. “In their economy and range, Diane Martin’s poems show us connections and affinities we had not anticipated, dazzling us, intriguing us, and keeping us off balance. These persona poems challenge and complicate our notions of the Muse.… fine-sculpted line after line resonates with grace and elegance.” ![]() This concern with consequence is most visible in an astonishing series in the voices of the women Picasso painted. Her language doesn’t reconfigure the quotidian it engages with the fire and shadows left in the wake of love, memory, grief-the wreckage of living. “You already know what happens between breakfast and dinner writes Diane K. This book woke me up, and I feel pretty certain it’ll do the same for you.” Martin has a serious gift for precise, textured, and dynamic language, and her keen habit of seeing the world slant makes these poems feel very much alive. That couldn’t be less the case with this terrific book. With most contemporary poetry, too often I know where I’m going well before I get there. The varied speakers of these poems are pithy, down to earth, and winningly direct in their wisdoms, as well as eloquent, colloquial, tender, occasionally bawdy, and very much full of surprise. ![]() “Diane Martin’s wonderful new collection Hue & Cry is alarmingly full of lines, images and observations I dearly wish I had written myself. In particular, the dozen poems in the voices of Picasso’s lovers, wives, mistresses, and friends portray women as creators, subjects, and muses against the backdrop of the entire twentieth century. The poems in Hue & Cry, Martin’s second poetry collection, explore the world of art-what inspires creativity? what does genius mean? what awakens the imagination? who decides who is an artist? But these poems are also about the art of living in the world.
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