Readers of Manning-Yarde’s first poetry collection, 'Every Watering Word', are well-served to read in the order that the author has intended, because this book of poems invites us on the journey its writer has undertaken. Manning-Yarde is working her words with fierce determination, with sweat on the brow, that the words, in their primacy, will reveal the stubborn, elusive, blessed truths of human degradation and sublimity. She is fearlessly and tenderly honest as she weaves both personal history and imagined moments. This woman warrior sings about what has made her, is making her, with poems that web outward and affix to other selves across oceans, continents, spanning time, and, with startling agility, alight once again into the now of the author’s life.
One of the joys of this collection is the deliberateness of its ordering of poems. It feels as if Manning-Yarde is establishing the symbolic and imagistic vocabulary readers will need in order draw nourishment during the journey. She begins with the first section, Women Warriors, establishing the terrain of womanhood with its blessings, travails, and rich legacies. From “This/ A Woman’s Geography,” inspired by the Women’s March of October 25, 1997, she proclaims woman, “…As both doula and newborn, she is beautiful in her becoming.” She sings of the courage of brown mothers who “risk heartbreak and spine snap to love the unspared.” In the final poem of this section, “The North Star, for All Women Warriors,” Manning-Yarde signals from where she and others will draw the necessary strength and courage: “Then my Mother, forger of road from Heaven to Earth, placed hand on my stomach feeling for my hand back, beckoning, ‘Now, come. Be the North Star!’”
In the next section, Building Bridges Backwards, Manning-Yarde asserts, in the very first poem, “We are Commissioned for Greatness”: ”Burrow deep into Mother Earth’s mouth, Soak in every watering word,” acknowledging that each of us must dig in the dirt for the histories that lurk like blueprints, from which we might “…read the braille of how we came / From those times through these times.” In the third section, Every Watering Word: The Been, the Because, the Becoming, the father poems establish the threads of family: death, birth, promise, identity, legacy, and impermanence. The poems then turn forward in direction, with three successive pieces for her sons, Keith and Maceo.
In the fourth section, Hymns Living Inside Hems, Manning-Yarde establishes the dual-edged nature of the Christian tradition in the lives of early black Americans: as instrument of oppression and means of deliverance. The subsequent poems chronicle how the individual and cultural persistence of African-Americans redeem a faith from subjugating force to liberating tradition, via the alchemy of suffering and survival.
In the next section, Mimicking Twilight, Manning-Yarde juxtaposes two apparently opposing human experiences: physical and spiritual desire and ecstasy. In the second to last poem of this section, “Vaginas are Mirrors,” she sheds this tension in place of a greater awareness: “At some point, the lessons I will return to are that when allowed, God mirrors love. And sex is not armor but a donation and blessing.”
The two final sections stand strongly apart from the earlier poems, similarly to how Revelation stands apart from the Gospels and Letters. In Across Broken Mirrors, Manning-Yarde achieves an elevated poetic power and precision. These poems capture broken lives in snapshots that are terribly precise and revelatory. In Improvisation, she gives us moments where the sudden or the ordinary is transformed into magic and beauty. As poet, Manning-Yarde faces the unpredictability of life and random finality of death, with images and scenes held loosely in her fists. She lays them out in her final pieces, daring the reader to stand with her, bravely, in front of a death that “…does not sit with her legs crossed.” These stunning poems transcend and are to be savored. They culminate Manning-Yarde’s stirring collection and additionally serve as harbingers of the next stage of her journey, where the power of her poetry exceeds previous limits.
This review was written by Mike Pipa, my friend and former colleague.
