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language: English
country: Vanuatu
year: 1983
form: poetry
dates read: 17.1.23
Grace Mera Molisa’s poetry collection Black Stone, published in 1983, three years after Vanuatu’s independence, is a bit of a mixed bag; this is true both aesthetically and politically. it’s clearly, in many ways, still riding the high of independence: it believes in the promises of the postcolonial government and is committed to a state-building project to the — admitted — point of a mild “zenophobia” (sic) as part of the process of decolonization. Molisa is unabashedly polemic, and this is what I liked best about the collection; I was less moved by the more neutrally reflective poems, which mostly fell kind of flat for me.
the verse form really mostly didn’t work for me. I don’t love short-line poems at the best of times, and the enjambments and line break placements here were often pretty clunky. reading the poems as (effectively) prose poems helped, and there were some places (and some poems) where the line length was being leveraged for rhythmic purposes that convinced me, but on the whole it sounds like I would like her later work better.
the closing poem, “Vatu Invocation”, was the highlight for me, but I also love the phrase “Custom is / as custom does!” in “Custom”. I also feel more positively about the collection as a whole after reading this article by Selina Tusitala Marsh about Molisa’s work (thanks wigwamcore!). I liked the collection overall, even if some of the poems were definite misses for me, and there are some big standouts either in whole or in part (“Custom”, “Marriage”, “Vatu Invocation”). worth a read in spite of my frustration with the verse structure.
moods: polemic, reflective