School of Udhra takes its title from the Bedouin poetic tradition
associated with the seventh-century Arab poet Djamil, the Udhrite school
of poets who, "when loving die." Bedouin tradition, however, is only one
of the strands of world revery these poems have recourse to. They obey a
"bedouin" impulse of their own--fugitive, moving on, nomadic. Ogo the
fox, the Dogon avatar of singleness and unrest, runs throughout,
crossing and recrossing divided ground, primal isolate, insistent within
the book's cross-cultural weave.
The poems track variances of union and disunion--social, sexual, mystic,
mythic--both formally and in their content. They return rhapsody to its
root sense: stitching together. Threads ranging through ancient Egypt,
shamanic Siberia, Rastafarian Jamaica and elsewhere figure in, inflected
by conjunctive and disjunctive cadences inspired by jazz, Gnaoua
trance-chant, cante jando and other musics.
"'Purgatorial stealth' (as School of Udhra puts it), within a
startling progression, I find, of imageries, becomes the poem's
enigmatic seductive, sometimes wavering, sliding traverse of a spiritual
wilderness. I have no doubt that the book is a remarkable and daring
testament that needs to be read and re-read for the unpredictable
measure of involved enchantment it unfolds . . . A book of haunted
pleasure."--Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock
"Nathaniel Mackey has said that in language we inherit the voices of the
dead. In School of Udhra he transcribes immeasurable spaces of the
dispossessed who call him runaway. This writing increasingly unleashes
each skittish letter into the risk of syllabic stutter 'vatic scat'
stagger. How else ever re-trace or re-member the speaker of a ghost in
sentences we step across. Words or segments of lines, stab, cut, rift,
rend, relate, blaspheme, and bless."--Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson
Nathaniel Mackey, recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers' Award, is the
author of Eroding Witness (1985), Whatsaid Serif (City Lights,
1998), Atet A.D. (City Lights, 2001), Bedouin Hornbook (1986) and
Djbot Baghosus's Run (1993), as well as Discrepant Engagement:
Dissonance Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993). He has
taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Duke University.
