A Whorl of Poetry

Index of Authors

No Language is Neutral

Poetry by Dionne Brand.

Dionne Brand has written at least the following books:
Poetry:
  • Land to Light On (1997)
  • No Language is Neutral (1990)
  • Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984)
  • Primitive Offensive (1983)
  • Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Cardenal in Defense of Claudia (1983)
  • Earth Magic (1980/1993)
  • 'Fore Day Morning (1978)
Fiction:
  • At the Full & Change of the Moon (1999)
  • In Another Place, Not Here (1996) [novel]
  • Sans Souci and Other Stories (1988/1994)

Non-Fiction:

  • Bread Out of Stone (1994)
  • We're Rooted Here, They Can't Pull Us Up (1994)
  • No Burden to Carry (1991)
  • Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots, Speaking of Racism (1986)

listen, just because I've spent these
few verses fingering this register of the heart,
clapping life, as a woman on a noisy beach,
calling blood into veins dry as sand,
do not think that things escape me,
this drawn skin of hunger twanging as a bow,
this shiver whistling into the white face of capital, a
shadow traipsing, icy veined and bloodless through
city alleys of wet light, the police bullet glistening
through a black woman's spine in November, against
red pools of democracy bursting the hemisphere's
seams, the heart sinks, and sinks like a moon.

-- From "hard against the soul," No Language is Neutral (1994), p. 42

Links:

It's true, you spend the years after thirty turning over
the suggestion that you have been an imbecile,
hearing finally all the words that passed you like air,
like so much fun, or all the words that must have
existed while you were listening to others. What
would I want with this sentence you say flinging it
aside ... and then again sometimes you were duped,
poems placed deliberately in your way.

-- From "Hard against the soul,"
No Language is Neutral (1994), p. 49 		Someone at a party
drew me aside to tell me a lie
about my poems,
they said "you write well,
your use of language is remarkable"
Well if that was true, hell
would break loose by now,
colonies and fascist states would fall,
housework would be banned,
pregnant women would walk naked in the streets,
men would stay home at night, cowering.
whoever it was, this trickster,
I wish they'd keep their damn lies
to themselves.


-- From Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), p. 33

one year and a half
I wrestled in the trenches
with opportunists, quasi-feminists and their government friends;
a struggle like that in some places
would be revolutionary, empower a whole people;
here in Toronto
we get a community service
and a congratulatory letter
from the minister of immigration.


-- #6, Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia. 		I feel wicked
when there's no snow in December
as if I've willed it so
I say 'damn good there's no blasted snow';
I have no sympathy for skiers,
I say they enjoy other people's misfortunes,
snow plough drivers and other warm blooded creatures
as for ski resort owners - procurers and panders!
when there's no snow in December
I feel wicked and positively sublime.


-- #30, Winter Epigrams