Sunflower Brother

By Sam Witt

Poetry. "Sam Witt's poems are a rhapsody and 'crisp singing' both. The best are purest poetry--mixing beauty, the reaches of language, and an imagination equally made up of body and of grace. He speaks in all our tones. His equivalences are fresh and reveal an involved, likable world"--Carol Frost.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 188083474X
• ISBN13: 9781880834749
• Release Date: November 1992
• Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center
• Length: 89 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.7" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

An exceptional book

As has been said elsewhere, Sam Witt writes language of unashamed and disturbing beauty and lushness, startling imagery, with gorgeous and ambitious syntax, a serpentine and intense prose, and yet it's a poetry that knows that language isn't everything. I think he's a poet who is writing poems that are responsive to the fullness of human nature, rooted in history, culture, time, and place found in relationships and at the big moments of pressure rather than abstracted into protective humor, preciousness or other hermetic and protective postures. In all of his work, Witt is an unblinkered poet. As the cover suggests, this is a dark book rooted in Faulkner and O'Connor, and yet it is also a book about innocence.

Death and boyhood

These are for the most part lyric narrative poems, rooted in Witt's boyhood in North Carolina, in the South. I grow somewhat tired of the "I," the first person self-gazing of such poems, although I admit that Witt is elegant and masterful in his use of the forms. The best poems in the book, in my opinion, are the first and last: "The Cold War" and "My Kiss." . Interestingly, both of these contain wire, "razorwire" in the first instance and "concertina wire" in the second, wire here a succinct metaphor for the ripping caused by death, loss, and destruction. Most of the poems in Sunflower Brother are obsessed with death, particularly that of friends and family members. There is a murder (Emmett Till); a mercy killing (an old or injured horse); a 19th century death (a toddler in her satin-lined coffin à la book Wisconsin Death Trip); suicides; hidden death (a corpse in the leaves); political execution (Ceauscescu); death in nature ; death from old age; premature death from cancer; and death from drug overdose. And, finally, there is death as voluptuousness: (21) "I've been told that dying is a kind of honey that soaks us from inside." These are also poems of recollected boyhood and youth, shaped by a boy's sensual and sensed apprehension of the world and of people, rooted both in the body and in the natural world; they are pastoral poems brought round to the "I." The "I" seeks his own reflection in a fish eye and in the glazed-over eye of a dead possum. Sam Witt observes his world with great attentiveness and describes it in exquisite, aching detail, as if he needs to remember each cicada, each spider's web, each blade of grass and decomposing leaf.