Like the feast day recalled in its title, this collection of twenty narrative poems venerates the dead. Brenda Marie Osbey invokes, impersonates, and converses with her Afro-New Orleans forebears―both blood ancestors and spiritual predecessors―weaving in hypnotic cadence a spell as potent as the religious and magical mysteries of her native culture. In All Saints we come to believe the dead do live, in the slave bricks paving the city’s faubourgs, in the Hoodoo rites and images of saints, and especially in ourselves, who “walk upon the earth a living man / wearing all the shrouds of mourning like a skin / and memory like a stone inside your organs.”
Assisted by a glossary of New Orleans ethnic expressions, place names, and characters, we discern in these poems a multitude of voices that speak to us from colonial times forward. We hear Juan San Malo, leader of a slave rebellion; Luis Congo, a free Kongo man; myriad brothers and sisters, both distinct and collective; and the city itself, “thrumming / eternal / ever / at the tracks.” Chanting, lamenting, outpouring, healing―Osbey’s poems measure her own musical refrain to the past while keeping time with the present: “we cry out together / in time to hear their cries.”
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Osbey's style is accessible. Idiosyncrasies such as the absence of capital letters fade into the background once a reader tunes in to the poems' compelling dramatic situations: a desperate dialogue with Coffin Street's prophetic Mother Catherine, a prayer from San Malo for his maroon colony, an heartfelt open letter about the evening news to singer Nina Simone. Like Jonathan Swift's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" and other formal verse satires, Osbey's poems stack their grievances and observations on top of each other until, near the end, the tone breaks and she utters terribly moving truths--"the night is a bastard gleaming"--before cooling down. Osbey's book details family relationships, community life, and the struggle for redemption. This struggle is laid bare in "The Head of Luis Congo," a sequential poem about the beheading of Congo, a free black man hired in 1726 as keeper of the road along Bayou St. John, a route favored by escaping slaves. The poem's interplay between confession and braggadocio is a testament to Osbey's skill as a storyteller; the reader damns and pities Congo simultaneously. The book's title refers to the New Orleans custom of whitewashing tombs on All Saints' Day, and at her best, Osbey gives us a chance to observe how life and death intertwine. --Edward Skoog
Brenda Marie Osbey, a native New Orleanian, is a poet and essayist working in English and French, and is Poet Laureate Emerita of Louisiana. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, including All Souls: Essential Poems.
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