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Ladataan... Natural BirthTekijä: Toi Derricotte
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Kirjaudu LibraryThingiin nähdäksesi, pidätkö tästä kirjasta vai et. Ei tämänhetkisiä Keskustelu-viestiketjuja tästä kirjasta. Toi Derricotte, an award-winning poet , professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation for up and coming African-American poets, wrote this collection of narrative poems in the late 1970s, when her son reached 16 years of age. It was originally published in 1983, and reissued in 2000 with a preface from the author. In 1962, Derricotte was a college student in Detroit, a beautiful, bright and driven young woman and practicing Catholic. Early that year she became pregnant by her lover and future husband, and she had to withdraw from university. She was unable to return to her parents' house in Michigan, and traveled to a home for unwed mothers in a distant city during her seventh month of pregnancy. There was no room available at the home when she arrived, and she was placed with a nearby family until December, a month before her due date. During her pregnancy, Derricotte read about the benefits of natural childbirth, and decided that she wanted to go through labor and delivery without analgesia. She did so, alone from her family, her lover, or the other young women in the home, and this powerful set of poems largely describes her excruciating experience during L&D, the unexpected numbness toward her son that she felt immediately after his birth, and with the loneliness, inadequacy and fear she experienced toward the end of her pregnancy. In this excerpt from "holy cross hospital", Derricotte poignantly describes the plight of three other pregnant women: couldn't stand to see these new young faces, these I highly recommend this superb collection of narrative poems, but would advise you to get the 2000 edition that contains Derricotte's insightful preface. näyttää 2/2 ei arvosteluja | lisää arvostelu
With insightful candour, Toi Derricote's poem explores the ways in which her confusion about love and sex and longing detracted from the pleasures of pregnancy and motherhood. Kirjastojen kuvailuja ei löytynyt. |
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Google Books — Ladataan... LajityypitMelvil Decimal System (DDC)811.54Literature English (North America) American poetry 20th Century 1945-1999Kongressin kirjaston luokitusArvio (tähdet)Keskiarvo:
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Derricotte, is now a Professor of English at Pittsburgh and award-winning poet. As a girl in 1962 she had strong feelings as to the behavior required of her. As she explains in the introduction, "It was a terrible thing, especially, for a black middle-class girl to come up pregnant. Part of the lifelong work of our class and gender was to prove beyond doubt that black people were civilized, not beasts." She married the father of her son, a struggling artist unable to provide much, when she was five months pregnant, and went away to a home for unwed mothers to have the baby. A subsequent exchange with an author she admired led to a large part of this manuscript "pouring down the page, and I began to move my lips, as if the wind was coming out of me, playing my teeth and tongue like an instrument."
This recounting of her girls-view experiences is powerful. This one, for example, is called "Maternity":
when they checked me in, i was thinking: this is going to be
a snap! but at the same time, everything looked so different!
this was another world, ordered and white. the night moved
by on wheels.
suddenly the newness of the bed, the room, the quiet,
the hospital gown they put me in, the sheets rolled up
hard and starched and white and everything white except the
clock on the wall in red and black and the nurse's back as
she moved out of the room without speaking, everything
conspired to make me feel afraid.
how long, how much will i suffer?
the night looked in from bottomless windows.
***
Toni Morrison was an editor at Random House and wanted to publish this book, but she finally wrote Derricotte that, "It doesn't fit in our categories; we don't know where to put it." Thank goodness Crossing Press published it, and Firebrand Books re-published it. It doesn't matter what category the book goes in, although Poetry will do. It's just plain an excellent book, with a lot to tell us about her life and our lives. ( )