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Black Fire Reignited

This is a poetry of insistence, one that requires us to make an emotional and sensory compact with the imagery. When we dwell inside a world of swirling rhythms, how can we deny its glory? When we are compelled to see the world’s luminescence, how can we remain in the dark? The final image in the long title poem pays homage to the inventive idea, seen in architectural terms as a phallic construct—a skyscraper finger pointing to the heavens where the spirit of poetry “sings and lives.” And thus it is that throughout this collection Troupe dances on the knife-edge of sentiment and sentimentality. Sometimes he cuts himself as he does his rhythmic dance, but often he compels us to dance alongside him, seduced by the language he has constructed for himself and for us inside the muscle of rhythm. These poems say what they mean without apology. Diglossic, didactic, and rhythmically complex, they suggest that, if we dare to listen with every sense we’ve got, experience can teach us how to sculpt magic out of the ordinary. —Lucinda Roy