Written over a span of twenty years, Grace of Centuries is an act of redress. Beginning with the African presence in the Bible and travelling through inheritances both collective and personal, Hope Anderson celebrates Black voices across centuries and continents, ranging from Bilali Muhammad, Queen Nzinga, and the Chevalier de Saint-Georges to Gannibal, John Ware, and Phyllis Wheatley - to name just a few. In so doing, he intervenes in a legacy that for so long did not offer welcome or embrace to so many, assuming his own place alongside such Canadian poetic icons as Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, and Anderson's friend, the late, great bpNichol, to whom this book pays tribute. In poems of complex clarity, Grace of Centuries demonstrates the value of a language that speaks to all.
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Poetry