Birds of Fire

Page 7 March–April 2008 (“technicolor women with mountains / of breasts and wide laps that held nursing children”) moving through such musical matriarchs as Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Dinah Washington, finally naming James as the “defiant mulatto / her body a plump fire.” Jackson delves into family history in the book’s first section, with James evoked at the book’s start. Tension between the speaker’s mother and father (and between black men and women in general) is evident in many of these poems, paralleling the unhappy lovers in many of James’s songs: In their songs they remember the feeling of that first kiss as they followed their men to northern cities; men who bit their tongues, ate dirt, dust and their pride. Worked anywhere. These women knew only a blues could mask the painful smell of faces stuck to the goggles their men wore in steel factories. Now, they have no time for beauty, theirs left in wind whispering through bulrush… These formidable women have little time for glamour , so they come to rely, in Jackson’s verse, on the power of a voice as powerful as James’s, a woman “too big to be invisible.” The collection’s second section pivots on this power, on all James could do that “ordinary” women couldn’t: so she flings fire for the fatherless girls who are trying to be women, razors piercing men with words like Cling to me Daddy, pleading with the wrong one to Trust In Me, promising she’d rather go blind than lose the man she loves. And Etta just kept on. Though the women Jackson describes throughout What Yellow Sounds Like may take their cues from James, Jackson herself is careful to show us the emotions behind the lives of both men and women. The poems dealing with men’s lives, both with and independent of women, come later in the collection, but are no less moving. In “April in Germany,” Jackson depicts the freedom her enlisted father found in hearing jazz resonate in another country: With my Rolleiflex, I caught Chet in focus, all else, hazy but worth the risk of being shot by Polish base guards, worth the threat of an AWOL charge, worth this long cold night of nights before Spring as though it and I had wings. Jackson gives us a living portrait of generations of black women, making sure such lives no longer remain unsung. But it is the women of What Yellow Looks Like who linger after one has closed the book. They are women who “[c]ould cut you with an eye / sure as look at you.” They are women like Great Aunt Fannie in “Anodyne,” who “carried a knife / in her purse, claiming she could cut any / one’s ass too short to shit.” Linda Susan Jackson has inherited the legacy of these women, and in the poems of this collection, she follows her grandmother’s dictum from the poem “Intuition”: “Everything don’t need to be told. Some things must.” By invoking the music of James, the heartache of her mother, and the dignity of her grandmother, Jackson gives us a living portrait of generations of black women, delineating their lives with precision and insight, making sure such lives no longer remain unsung. Allison Joseph is a poet and writer who lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is on the faculty of Southern Illinois University. Her most recent book of poems is Worldly Pleasures (Word Press). Joseph continued from previous page Detail from cover Birds of Fire David Rife Jazz etc. John Murray Flambard Press http://www.flambardpress.co.uk 261 pages; paper, £8.99 Given that none of the various heydays of jazz have generated anything like a golden age of jazzcentered fiction, it comes as something of a shock to discover that the first few years of the twenty-first century have produced—long since the cultural momentum of the music itself has been exhausted—an abundance of jazz novels, several of which harbor lofty artistic objectives. Take for example, to name just a few, Stanley Crouch’s Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing...