The Plum Flower Dance - (Pitt Poetry) by Afaa Michael Weaver (Paperback)

About the Book

Winner of the 2008 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence The Plum Flower Dance includes new poems and poems from Weaver's earlier works My Fathers Geography, and Timber and Prayer, among others.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2008 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence "Weaver has crafted a virtual planet in this book with plenty of alternate geographies for readers of all flavors and stripes. Marvelous. Huge. Prodigious." --North American Review

Review Quotes

Weaver explores and rethinks questions of identity-that great American subject. Over the years, he has listened to a chorus of other voices, the inflections of the past, as they have come together to shape and enlarge his own distinctive, musical voice. . . . He has carved a unique space for himself in contemporary American poetry.-- "Edward Hirsch on Timber and Prayer"

Weaver has crafted a virtual planet in this book with plenty of alternate geographies for readers of all flavors and stripes. Marvelous. Huge. Prodigious.-- "North American Review"

Weaver is expanding the great tradition in American parlance and song. He strives for the deep resonance of American Grand Opera, in the Whitman tradition. [Among] his sources for inspiration are the Big Bands, his father's and mine. His poems expand the rhythm section, 'straight talk' from ancestry and remembrance. His poems are incremental revelations, his own poetic music. It is a fine rhetorical striving, undiminished.-- "Michael S. Harper on My Father's Geography"

Weaver's life studies and lyrics are imbued with a vivid sense of language, a vivid sense of the world, a vivid sense of their inseparability. And his tonal range--from unabashed passion to the subtlest velleity--is impressive indeed. This is a singular talent.-- "Henry Louis Gates Jr. on My Father's Geography"

About the Author

Afaa Michael Weaver is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Timber and Prayer The Indian Pond Poems; My Father's Geography; The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005; The Government of Nature, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and City of Eternal Spring, winner of the Phyllis Wheatley Book Award. He is alumnae professor of English at Simmons College in Boston. Weaver is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, a Pew fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Fulbright scholar appointment, among other honors. In 1998, he became the first Elder of the Cave Canem Foundation.