Singing The Bones Together

By Angela Shannon

Angela Shannon's poems bridge the real world of work, hardship, and celebration, and the spirit world of ancestors, remembrance, and faith. Singing the Bones Together brings to us this poet's marvelous talent for capturing the eloquent idiom and protean genius of seemingly ordinary black folks. Shannon's voice is genuinely new-through her characters, she gives dramatic expression to experience and feeling, and she possesses a gift for lyric poems of intimate intensity and a keen consciousness of the shared past. The historical sweep of her work is from the Middle Passage to post-integration America, and her characters-living and dead, human and in nature-create a sweet and indomitable polyphony of voices. Shannon's poems vividly imagine the thought and feeling of black women, but she also makes water, trees, nameless ghosts, and familiar spirits speak of struggle, vindication, sorrow, and hard-won love.