110
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Through a mixture of poetry and fiction, along with references to history, both the anthology All the Songs We Sing, edited by Lenard D. Moore and introduced by North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green, and the short fiction collection If I Had Two Wings by Randall Kenan depict a diversity of North Carolina voices and various aspects of Carolina culture and landscape.
ANGELIC VOICES SING IN NORTH CAROLINA
The themes of spirituality, history, and loss in the collection All the Songs We Sing, edited by Lenard D. Moore, are explored via various forms of poetry and prose that effectively reflect the people and landscapes of North Carolina. In “A Reminiscing Daddy,” Moore, reminds us of how quickly life can come to an end as he describes the loss of a daughter when she was a freshman at East Carolina University. In Evie Shockley’s “The Ballad of Bertie County,” we find ghosts of slavery and historic preservation. In the poem “Rattle Grass at Fort Fisher,” Darrell “SCIPOET” Stover describes how “Wind carry whispers” of the US Colored Troops who engaged in the taking of Fort Fisher in Wilmington (102). Poets like L. Teresa Church in “Golden Whistles for Emmett Till” sing of martyrs, as does Diane Judge in “Because of Emmett Till,” who reminds us
a review by Reginald Watson Randall Kenan. If I Had Two Wings: Stories. W.W. Norton, 2020. Lenard D. Moore, Editor. All the Songs We Sing: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. Blair, 2020.
LENARD D. MOORE, a native of Jacksonville, NC, received the 2014 North Carolina Award for Literature. He has taught at NC A&T, NC State, Shaw University, and the University of Mount Olive, and he has served as President of the Haiku Society of America. His poetry has previously appeared in NCLR 1996, 2004, and NCLR Online 2018, among many other venues and in his several books (many reviewed in NCLR). L. Teresa Church’s essay about his founding of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective in NCLR 2016 is reprinted in the collection reviewed here.
COURTESY OF QUAIL RIDGE BOOKS
REGINALD WATSON earned his PhD from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is an Associate Professor of English at East Carolina University, where he has been awarded the ECU Outstanding Service Award and the NAACP Legacy Award. In addition to his scholarly articles on African American writers, he writes plays, like A Black History Play; The Kwanza Story; I’ve Seen the Mountaintop, But It Don’t Look So Good; and A Princeville Play.
that freedom rides and sit-ins, inspired by Till’s “open coffin,” launched a movement that emancipated the nation (66). Issues of racism past and present are also recalled in Patricia Johnson’s “In a Place Where,” which describes the lynching of G.P. Johnson, who was burned alive and decapitated in Virginia. Celeste Doaks’s “Black Barbie” evokes the regal presence of First Lady Michelle Obama. Other historical figures, like Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr., come to life in works by Gina M. Streaty and Moore, while references to slavery and the Middle Passage are brilliantly imagined in “Ashe” by Afefe Lana Tyehimba, in which the poet describes the slave outpost Goree Island and the “Door of No Return” and invokes the African Goddesses Billow and Theit. This collection is full of references to sacrifice during slavery and the civil rights movement, as well as within the context of war. “Sweetness” by Sheila Smith McKoy shows what happens to McKoy’s “bastard cousin” (72), a soldier who returns home, absent without leave, probably struggling with the mental demons of PTSD. His “sweetness” gives way to violence, when he kills himself and his “wayward” wife “miles away from his ‘M-16’” (73). In McKoy’s