Homeplace

Finalist for the 1991 National Book AwardIn The Homeplace, the stories of a family become the history of a people as Marilyn Nelson Waniek sketches the lives descended from her great-great-grandmother Diverne.The poet's mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, inspired this volume when she bequeathed to Waniek from her deathbed the tales that had shaped her life. The first section of the book presents those stories transformed into graceful, humorous, and deeply touching poems.In the book's second section Waniek honors her late father, Melvin Nelson, and tells the story of his ""family"": the fabled group of black World War II aviators known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Using the language and perspective of her father and his comrades, Waniek explores through a few of their individual stories the hardships and achievements of the thousand black flyers trained at Tuskegee Institute.Throughout The Homeplace, the reader is involved in a series of sharply portrayed lives. By telling a continuous story in a mix of free verse and traditional forms, Waniek gives her work pace and intensity. She handles the villanelle, the sonnet, and the popular ballad with equal skill and gusto. ""I just knew we were going to live some history,"" Johnnie Nelson said at the end of her life. Her daughter has produced an eloquent homage to that history, celebrating the survival of Afro-American pride.

Marilyn Nelson Waniek writes with an inimitable ratio of wit to terror, indignation to jubilance. She may well have the most wicked timing in poetry today. Her narratives needed to be told; her sonnets are indelible in issue and in technique. In The Homeplace, as quest turns to revelation, over a century of vibrant, often triumphant African-American lives are released into art. Required, exhilarating reading.--Sandra McPherson, Marilyn Nelson Waniek's third collection of poems, The Homeplace, shows her many talents to great advantage. Waniek is crisply intelligent and keen in discipline. She is a teller of family tales whose black roots in the South quickly embrace us all. Maybe best, Waniek has the full range of a blues singer's passion, from bitterness to joy, and she shows why in the right hands poetry's cry of the heart is still strong and still fresh. Bless Marilyn Nelson Waniek for her poems!--Dave Smith, Marilyn Waniek knows what family history means--we're all strange and all related. This is our life, a reader in the happy thrall of these fine poems understands.--William Matthews

Marilyn Nelson Waniek is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and former Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut. She is the author of eight books of poetry, including For the Body, Mama's Promises, and The Fields of Praise, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Poet's Prize.