When the guitars tickle a bedrock of drum and bass, when the girl a
shock out and a steady hand curve round her sweat-smooth waist,
when the smell of Charlie mingles with the chemicals of her hair
and the groove is of the sweetest friction - how is a young man to
keep his way pure?
Kwame Dawes's poetry rises to new heights in these psalms of
confession and celebrations of reggae's power to prophesy, to seek
after righteousness and seduce the body and mind. Here is poetry
walking the bassline, which darts sweetly around the rigid lick of
the rhythm guitar yet expresses all the sadness and alienation at
the heart of reggae. This, for Dawes, is the earth which 'never
tells me my true home' and where behind every chekeh of the guitar
there is the ancestral memory of the whip's crack. "Shook Foil"
dramatises the conflict between the purity of essences and the
taints of the actual, not least in the poems which focus on Bob
Marley's life. Here is the rhygin, word-weaving prophet and the
philanderer with the desperate hunger for yard pumpum, the revealer
of truths and the buffalo soldier who has married yard with show
biz affluence. Above all there is the intense sadness of Marley's
death, for how can one live without the duppy conqueror's defiant
wail in an island gone dark for the passing of his song?
But for "Shook Foil" there is always the gospeller's hope that the
dead will rise from dub ruins and patch a new quilt of sound for
the feet to prance on. And when the high hat shimmering and the
bass drum thumping, what else to do but dance?
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
