I WAS ALREADY planning to read this, but Reeves's essay in Granta, "Through the Smoke, Through the Veil, Through the Wind," bumped it up to the top of my list. As the variety of honors it has received suggests, it is excellent.
As in Zadie Smith's successful re-boots of Forster (On Beauty), Chaucer (The Wife of Willesden), and Dickens (The Fraud), Reeves engages deftly with some Anglo canonical influences (T. S. Eliot in "Poem, in an Old Language," Yeats in "As a Child of North America," Beowulf in a couple of poems about Grendel) while foregrounding a Black cultural inheritance (Phyllis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, John and Alice Coltrane, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Jericho Brown). It's a heady brew, but he drinks it down and does not even wobble.
Take, for instance, the first of the two long poems at the book's center, "Domestic Violence," which appropriates the trip to the underworld in Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid as well as Pound's and Eliot's appropriations of that topos, then pivots on the astonishing datum that the Louis Till who figures in Pound's Pisan Cantos was the father of Emmett Till ("Yes, that Emmett Till," Reeves writes in the notes), taking the poem suddenly into the gravest urgencies of the present.
(I'm still trying to figure out whether the second long poem in the middle of the book, "Something about John Coltrane," is in dialogue with Michael S. Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane." It might be...but I'm not sure.)
Recurring images--field, tree, blood--give the book a mysterious unity. Those images may be connected--seem to be connected, in a way I don't understand-- to the most intimate poems of the book, those about the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, especially "After Death."
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