Review By Kathy Y. Wilson

The cover art for Black Wings & Blind Angels (Knopf), poet/novelist Sapphire's second poetry collection, says it all about the captured torture inside.

"Untitled," by dead it-boy and post-Warhol painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, is a hilariously violent stick figure whose body is charcoal-black, his head crowned by a thin afterthought-of-a-halo and whose eyes seem permanently bugged by all the trouble they've seen. But the arms are outstretched, and the bony fingers are splayed, as if reaching from the flames of hell.

Sapphire's words serve likewise. They flare up unexpectedly like embers, reminders that words define and describe us. More importantly, they save us, especially when we may not be worthy.

Certainly nobody knows Sapphire better than her poems, but it is a deft postmodern poetess who can take a blunt look at life (hers and ours) and ultimately put a similarly blunt pen to paper and regurgitate images as heartbreaking and unflinching as the ones here that resound like shouted secrets. These are tales of hatred within the family, incest, rape, abandonment and self-realization. In Sapphire's world family is where you find it and not the one you're born into.

There's the paragraph-length blurb, "An Ordinary Evening," in which "Once the sun has started to climb down the sky, things change," and a brother turns to a sister as casually as "asking are there any more hot dogs left or saying let's go get high. She said you just turned around and looked at her and said, 'Let's kill him, let's kill the old man.' "

This poem appears 26 pages into a collection that chronicles -- or more accurately , hints at -- Sapphire's life, including her mother's desertion of the children and subsequent descent into alcoholism. Meanwhile, they are shuffled off to foster care, ultimately ending up with an abusive, incestuous father.

But hints are only thrown and must, as with any confessional poet from Plath to Sexton, be caught with the eye and the ear. These poems beg to be read aloud and feasted over for hours because such care and, certainly, agony have gone into their appearance on the page.

Earlier, in "Breaking Karma #8," Sapphire recounts being "tricked" by her grandmother and an aunt into speaking to her mother on the telephone. They use the innocuous line "I want you to talk with someone," and her mother's voice "is thin, cold,/ and in retrospect I will realize drunk." Sapphire, void of emotion but clear-headed about the past, flatly promises to keep in touch and send a photograph of herself and her siblings. Later her mother recognizes only her.

"You look very nice/but who were those other two people?" Expectedly, the poet's reaction is one of devastation. "Putting the phone down/everything seems/so still and coming apart at the same time/a box in my brain opens and the one/that's in my chest closes."

The very cornerstone of this superb and heart-wrenching collection is "My Father Meets God (or, the Dream of Forgiveness)." It is a diatribe in which Sapphire has a final "conversation" with her deceased father, telling him she is fully aware of what he was and was not capable of: loving his children traditionally. She reveals things about his life he probably never shared with her. She has been left to speculate over the details, as many black children are at the hands of aloof and beleaguered fathers, intimidated by the adults their children have become.

Here, God is a woman who shows them both a film of his life. By the end, Sapphire has forgiven the man who molested her and misunderstood her. To say it is redemptive is belittling and an oversimplification.

Further, to say that Black Wings & Blind Angels is a necessary addition to the canon of American literature is an understatement. This is a significant and honest work of art -- pure, simple and painful -- the way poetry is meant to be. ©

E-mail Kathy Y. Wilson

Short Takes (February 3, 2000)
The Talented Mr.Stoltzman (January 20, 2000)

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