New Releases by Marilyn Nelson

A standardized methodology is proposed here that will permit assessment and ranking of geological sites against each other for degree of threat, interpretive value, and a potential historic site designation. The evaluation scheme provides a method of choosing between a number of similar features or sites.

Poems with a religious theme, the approach ranging from devotional to skeptical. In Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which is about a holy fool, she writes: "Big deal, / said Abba Jacob. / Miracles happen all the time. / We''re here, / aren''t we?"

Written from a neo-Marxist point of view by a prominent Italian architecturalhistorian, Architecture and Utopia leads the reader beyond architectural form into a broaderunderstanding of the relation of architecture to society and the architect to the workforce and themarketplace. It discusses the Garden Cities movement and the suburban developments it generated, theGerman-Russian architectural experiments of the 1920s, the place of the avant-garde in the plasticarts, and the uses and pitfalls of seismological approaches to architecture, and assesses theprospects of socialist alternatives.

Finalist for the 1991 National Book Award In The Homeplace, the stories of a family become the history of a people as Marilyn Nelson Waniek sketches the lives descended from her great-great-grandmother Diverne. The poet’s mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, inspired this volume when she bequeathed to Waniek from her deathbed the tales that had shaped her life. The first section of the book presents those stories transformed into graceful, humorous, and deeply touching poems. In the book’s second section Waniek honors her late father, Melvin Nelson, and tells the story of his “family”: the fabled group of black World War II aviators known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Using the language and perspective of her father and his comrades, Waniek explores through a few of their individual stories the hardships and achievements of the thousand black flyers trained at Tuskegee Institute. Throughout The Homeplace, the reader is involved in a series of sharply portrayed lives. By telling a continuous story in a mix of free verse and traditional forms, Waniek gives her work pace and intensity. She handles the villanelle, the sonnet, and the popular ballad with equal skill and gusto. “I just knew we were going to live some history,” Johnnie Nelson said at the end of her life. Her daughter has produced an eloquent homage to that history, celebrating the survival of Afro-American pride.

“Waniek is a poet of intelligence, passion, and gentleness with a fine sense of the comic and unfailing judgment about what constitutes a poetic line. She creates a rich mixture of impressions about the speaker of these poems as a woman who is at the same time in her mid-twenties and her mid-fifties, who is black and white and red, who is both trapped by and freed by motherhood.” —Miller Williams Marilyn Nelson Waniek writes with great wisdom and compassion. Grounded but never earthbound, her poems speak honestly and eloquently about giving birth, nurturing life, and facing death; they inhabit the present, fully aware of their responsibilities to the past and the future. Waniek leaves us with the affecting strength and assurance of lasting things, as in the poem “Mama’s Promise.” But the dangerous highway curves through blue evenings when I hold his yielding hand and snip his minuscule nails with my vicious-looking scissors. I carry him around like an egg in a spoon, and I remember a porcelain fawn, a best friend’s trust, my broken faith in myself. It’s not my grace that keeps me erect as the sidewalk clatters downhill under my rollerskate wheels. Then I think of Mama, her bountiful breasts. When I was a child, I really swear, Mama’s kisses could heal. I remember her promise, and whisper it over my sweet son’s sleep: When you float to the bottom, child, like a mote down a sunbeam, you’ll see me from a trillion miles away: my eyes looking upon you, my arms outstretched for you like night. From “Mama’s Promise” published in Mama’s Promises by Marilyn Nelson. Copyright © 1985 by Marilyn Nelson Waniek. All rights reserved.

A collection of poems about children and their lives.