Outlandish Blues.

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers Wesleyan University Press March 2003, $26.00; $12.95

Hardcover: ISBN 0-819-56583-0

Paper: ISBN 0-819-56584-9

Outlandish Blues, the second collection by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, argues for the power and fearlessness of the blues lyric and the gospel shout--traditional forms often given (literary) lip service, but rarely allowed to show true creative power. Her poems explore "female and race" themes: violence against women, racism, and the private and public histories of resistance to oppression, as well as the mythological and religious basis for oppression against women, against blacks in this culture.

From poems like "The Battered Blues (Four Movements)," which traces the end of a relationship because of violence, to the title poem, "Outlandish Blues," which critiques Stephen Spielberg's epic film Amistad, the collection showcases the work of a poet of great courage and inventiveness.

"Pantoum for a Black Man on a Greyhound Bus" uses this form to invent a kind of new blues, much the way Hawaiian music's slide invigorated the blues guitar, as the poems narrator reveals: "He left fifteen years behind prison walls/Anne Sexton used to call her asylum a jail/ ... Anne Sexton used to call her asylum a jail/I don't want to know how this brother earned his cell."

The most powerful and sustained poems in this collection are in a section about three women from the Old Testament: Sarah, Hagar and Lot's wife. They deal with infidelity, infertility and incest, as well as sacrifice and death. In "The Wife of Lot After the Fire," Lot's wife cries out: "What kind of God saves a man from what he deserves?"

Jeffers reveals her understanding of Alabama's Black Belt and what keeps it black and biblical. The questions of guilt, opportunity, who is saved and who is not, haunt the back roads and highways like the blues haunts Jeffers take on an American tradition almost lost to the community that bore it. Some of the poems like "Aretha at the Fame Studios" do not catch fire. But most do, paying homage to the people, who, when push came to shove, created the blues, the gospel shout and nurtured the spirit of a daring and important black poet.

--Patricia Spears Jones is the author of The Weather That Kills.