Hope's Hospice
While on assignment for the Virginia Quarterly Review to report on the impact of HIV/AIDS on Jamaica, Kwame Dawes could not prevent himself from writing poems in response to the stories he heard. In a way journalism is not designed to do, these poems pare away detail to reveal the truths of character and situation, and find forms which both give expression to and find a kind of perfection for fleeting, difficult lives. These poems became, in time, this, his fourteenth collection of verse.
Price
£7.99
Author(s)
Kwame Dawes
ISBN number
9781845230784
Pages
68
Price
£7.99
Classification
Poetry
Country setting
Jamaica
Publication date
04 May 2009

Powerfully illustrated by Joshua Cogan’s photographs, the art of Dawes’s poems makes it impossible to see HIV/AIDS as something that only happens to other people, and to marginalise their lives. Here, the experience of the disease becomes the channel for dramas that are both universal and unique, voices that are archetypal and highly individual – stories of despair and stoicism, deception and self-honesty, misery and joy in like. www..livehopelove.com

 

Variations

Kwame Dawes

Kwame Dawes is the author of twenty-two books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. He is Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner and George W. Holmes University Professor at the University of Nebraska. Dawes is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His awards include an Emmy, the Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing, and the Windham Campbell Prize for poetry.
View full profile