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Aug. 29th, 2011 09:30 amI wish I had more to say about Kevin Young's Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels. It's an awesome concept - the story of the Amistad rebellion and court case told through a collection of poems in the forms of monologues, letters, and prayers, and in the voices of James Covey, the free black interpreter, and Cinque, the rebel leader.
I admired the book, I appreciated many of the poems, but the work as a whole never quite came together for me, or hit me the way I wanted it to. Looking back, I suspect this is probably more my fault than the book's; first of all, the Amistad itself is so fascinating that I kept getting distracted from the poetry by wishing for a history book, and second of all I was reading it on a stressful bus ride and that is really never a good idea with poetry, at least for me. I need to be in the right mood to absorb that kind of sparse language-play, and a Megabus is not it.
Basically, this is a book I would have liked to read in a class, surrounded by primary-source documents and historical analysis, and with plenty of time and focus available to me to delve into Young's linguistic and rhetorical choices. I'm not not recommending it - okay, rephrasing, I am recommending it, but only if you give yourself the opportunity to appreciate it right, which I didn't.
I admired the book, I appreciated many of the poems, but the work as a whole never quite came together for me, or hit me the way I wanted it to. Looking back, I suspect this is probably more my fault than the book's; first of all, the Amistad itself is so fascinating that I kept getting distracted from the poetry by wishing for a history book, and second of all I was reading it on a stressful bus ride and that is really never a good idea with poetry, at least for me. I need to be in the right mood to absorb that kind of sparse language-play, and a Megabus is not it.
Basically, this is a book I would have liked to read in a class, surrounded by primary-source documents and historical analysis, and with plenty of time and focus available to me to delve into Young's linguistic and rhetorical choices. I'm not not recommending it - okay, rephrasing, I am recommending it, but only if you give yourself the opportunity to appreciate it right, which I didn't.
