Blues and Bliss

Blues singer, preacher, cultural critic, exile, Africadian, high modernist, spoken word artist, Canadian poet-these are but some of the voices of George Elliott Clarke. In a selection of Clarke's best work from his early poetry to his most recent, Blues and Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke offers readers an impressive cross-section of those voices. Jon Paul Fiorentino's introduction focuses on this polyphony, his influences-Derek Walcott, Amiri Baraka, and the canon of literary English from Shakespeare to Yeats-and his "voice throwing," and shows how the intersections here produce a "troubling" of language. He sketches Clarke's primary interest in the negotiation of cultural space through adherence to and revision of tradition and on the finding of a vernacular that begins in exile, especially exile in relation to African-Canadian communities.