S.C. native receives Poetry Book Prize

Every spring, the University of South Carolina's Poetry Initiative publishes a book of poems by the winner of the S.C. Poetry Book Prize.

Previous winners are Susan Meyers for her award-winning book, "Keep and Give Away"; Ray McManus for his collection, "Driving Through the Country Before You Are Born"; and last year's winner University of South Carolina professor Ed Madden for his first book, "Signals."

This year's winner, "How God Ends Us," poems by DeLana R.A. Dameron, was chosen by poet Elizabeth Alexander.

In her introduction, Alexander describes Dameron's poems as "beautiful and tough," adding, "They sound like no others to me."

This is the highest compliment for any poet. A unique voice is something most poets strive for, but few actually achieve.

Dameron is originally from Columbia although she now lives in New York City. Many of the poems are rooted in the place she comes from and her family's particular history and the history of African-Americans in the Palmetto State.

"To the Black Girl in Charleston, SC, Waving the Confederate Flag" is a powerful, honest look at present-day Charleston — this same city where, in her poem "Closer to Knowing" her elders worked hand-washing clothes in a porcelain tub as domestics on The Battery.

The book begins with a series of poems about the deaths of loved ones: a beloved grandmother, an uncle. These poems are filled with the gritty, realistic details that accompany the end of life, but they are balanced with loving descriptions of caregiving and preparing a body for burial.

"The Last Touch," which is addressed to the poet's mother, describes how she washes the hair of her grandmother and dresses her in "This intimate farewell."

The opening poem, "Lament," which will appear in the August issue of Essence magazine, is a lyrical meditation on the central themes of the collection.

The poems in "How God Ends Us" are intensely spiritual and address an all-knowing God whose power must be acknowledged and accepted, if not always understood. The power resides in the mystery: "How You/speak with fiery tongue, with smoke words. How You/hide spirits in the spaces of the house no one inhabits./There are other silences You keep."

Death haunts the poems in this fine collection, but it never dominates. There is much celebration that provides a kind of balance against inevitable loss.

"It is summer, the wrong season for dying," Dameron declares in the poem "Too Late to Uncapture." The poems move to Jamaica, the Gulf Coast and New York and turn to other subjects.

"Buff Bay, Jamaica," starts with a listing of negative connotations and moves toward the unique beauty of the country and its people: "... it is the turquoise smell/of ocean, and breadfruit, the eternal reggae/off-beat thumping in the distance." And there are wonderful, sensual love poems that come at the end of the collection, so that this movement from death toward love leaves the reader feeling like they have experienced the sweep of one rich existence that understands and celebrates the essence of survival and joy.

"The Body as a House" reminds us that despite our inherent and universal imperfections there is much to celebrate.

"The Body as a House"

After Forest Hamer

Say the body is not full of the spirit.

Say the spirit does not exist.

Repent.

Say there is no such thing as the rapture

and live your days on middle ground.

Say there is no such rapture.

Say the mouth is a portal between heaven and earth,

that the eyes bring in or shut out the light,

that the ears harbor a song with which to dance.

Say I live in the body in order to dance.

Say your body is only flesh

and not a house of habitable organs.

Repent. You should not say it.

Say the body is imperfect and love it still.

The body is, in fact, imperfect, but

say you love it, as I do.

"The Body as a House," from "How God Ends Us" by DeLana R. A. Dameron, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 2009: reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

Marjory Wentworth is South Carolina's poet laureate.