Red Clay Suite

Red Clay Suite

            I really enjoyed how land based Jeffer’s poems were. Many of the poems in this collection had this ecological sense of a special connection to the land where both tragedies and celebrations have been had on. Like tragedies and celebrations are water to the land, giving different kinds of nutrients and aspects to the red clay that was being lived on top of.

Jeffers also gave us a fable in the form of a poem here that I really enjoyed in Mister Buzzard and Brother Crow, I really enjoyed this poem because of the personification given to the two birds as wise, and the two are having a conversation it seems, about the passing of time. The crow is asking the buzzard what will happen next. And for me, it seemed like a metaphorical conversation between members in the black community, trying to tell what will happen next to the community. The buzzard says clearly, look to the past and it will tell us the future and the crow says, in so many words, ‘aw naw, that can’t be it’.

For me here, it seems like a kind of dialogue that doesn’t get much done, but has to happen in order for the crow to see what lies in the future. What I liked about the poem was the italicized dialogue that gives us the voice of either the crow or the buzzard and I also liked the metaphoric symbolism of the birds being human.

            Jeffers gives us more personification in Consider my brother as the Rabbit where a black man is compared to a rabbit. Jeffers give us some history, telling us the misspelling of br’er comes from bruh. The story of the whole poem seems in part to be about the actions that bruh rabbit took in order to bury his blues. I like how the end of the poem doesn’t have a period. It suggests this open ending, that bruh rabbit will continue to plant his blues in the garden. Here, Jeffers also gives us an ecological base of the poem where humans and land are changed the same way. Bruh rabbit continues planting his blues in the garden, and this reader wonders, what kind of flowers will grow?

            In the poem I’ve been up Late Reading the Book of Poems you Inscribed and Mailed to Me, Jeffers gives us an account of her parents in a very personified way as well. The father is a ‘prairie’ and the mother ‘red clay’ and we move from the metaphorical into the concrete question: If your poems are so wise, why can’t you be too? The question ripped at my heart, can you only be knowable in written form? Would you ever have the ability to try and express the wisdom I see inside of you, to us? I found Jeffers really good at evoking feeling from myself.

            There are so many poems in this collection that truly moved me! Eatonton (One) was one of them, I found the line near the end of the poem to affect me the most

“For now;/ nothing scares me one bit./ There’s cobbler every evening after supper.”

There’s this profoundness connected to this line. And I found a lot of that profound feeling reading Jeffer’s beautiful collection.