Black Stone

#294
Title: Black Stone
Author: Grace Mera Molisa
Publisher: Mana Publications (Suva, Fiji)
Year: 1983
Country: Vanatu
68 pages

The back cover bio states that the author "has recently begun writing in verse somewhat by accident. This collection is her first attempt." Both the accidental and preliminary nature of her poems is unfortunately evident in this volume. I spent a long time thinking about these poems. Specifically, I pondered why I don't find them appealing or compelling. Is it because they don't reflect a Western sensibility? I don't think so; I've read a great deal of U.S., British, and continental poetry in the same style: Abstract, non-imagistic, telling rather than showing. This is the polemical poetry one finds in any political movement, poetry that could as easily be a diatribe of a sentence or two or a paragraph, poetry that is "poetry" only because of how it is arranged on the page. Is it because they are better expressed orally than in writing? Again, I don't think so. I read several out loud but didn't find that this shifted my experience significantly. Instead, I think that even accounting for differences of culture and style, they aren't good poems, either linguistically or in their expression of content. Molisa was an important political activist for Vanatu, advocating for women, the arts, and anti-colonial policies. This collection might best be appreciated by reading them as polemics, not poetry.