Books – Danielle Legros Georges

Island Heart

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A beautifully translated work of poignant, lyrical poems by Ida Faubert that evoke the beauty, power and mystery of nature. This collection of poems reflects the intricate web of the human experience of love, loss and longing.

Reading the poetry of Ida Faubert, one is quickly struck by her ability to gracefully plot an emotionally-charged and layered interior landscape, ranging from the rawness of passion’s lost love to the tender, severed bonds of motherhood. In the beauty of her formal phrasing resides a poet’s desire to record life’s ever-evolving and nuanced lessons. Kudos to Danielle Legros Georges for a deft translation of this body of work by the lauded Haitian poet.

the dear remote nearness of you

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The Dear Remote Nearness of You will both move your heart and rattle you to the core. These lyrical, poignant, and powerful poems show Danielle Legros Georges’ deep intellect and profound empathy, as well as her endless gifts as a poet, storyteller, and brilliant oracle of the human spirit.

The Dear Remote Nearness of You speaks poetry’s origin in new and startling ways. This is the precise intelligence that knows it must step carefully across the light on the surface of the water… These poems form the contiguous dance of language choosing its own body at will, traveling across light and the dimensions of unarticulated history. This is the word rubbed onto the palimpsest of our being, the careful solo soprano in the space where music ends and poetry moves in to name what is eternal and what is only in the abbreviation of now. What a delightful book…

Sublime, by which I mean these poems present a world not merely beautiful, but so charged with life as to induce wonder. Desire, in all her manifestations (spells, curses, jealousy, want), runs through these pages.

Danielle Legros Georges gives us access to worlds that are both submerged and emerging. Whether her poems’ speakers contemplate centenarian eels, or seek to shift the rubble left by Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, The Dear Remote Nearness of You takes careful account of the cost of survival. The atmospheric quality of these poems is dense with attention to the sounds of an inhabitable life: the shock of a shouted racial slur, the high-pitched screech of children, the very sound of the earth splitting. The unsettling intimacies Georges reveals encompass our human relationships with animals, alongside our human understanding of ourselves. Haiti’s own mirrored conversations with itself, through generations of privation and exquisite natural beauty, are the centrepiece of this book’s success.

The Dear Remote Nearness of You reminds us that the poet is a keen observer, a benevolent panoptical being, standing at the crossroads of language and culture with all of her senses open. Georges’s astute panoptical gaze allows us to be in her world, albeit through a remote nearness of her.

City of Notions

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A mayor’s greatest privilege and greatest resource is listening to people all across our city, as they share their truths, their hurts, their hopes, and their dreams. City of Notions reflects and enriches that conversation as only art can.

Letters from Congo: A Chapbook

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In these 13 intimate and epistolary poems, an address, or a physical location where someone can be reached, swiftly morphs into a statement about the delicate nature of voicing one’s political opinions under Haiti's Duvalier regime. In crafting these necessary poems, Legros Georges compels the reader to abandon notions of romantic and glamorous life in exile, offering instead openings onto the endemic challenges of a family’s confrontations and negotiations of a separation that has no expiration date.

Enzo Silon Surin

Maroon

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In her debut collection. . . Danielle Legros Georges explores her identity as a woman, daughter, lover and haitian émigré. her poems are as much about sacrifice and namelessness as they are about love.

Geoffrey Philp