Nonfiction / poetry / historical
Red Mountain Press
March 15, 2015
ISBN-10 : 0985503149
ISBN-13 : 978-0985503147
122 pages
5 stars
The first thing we learn from Mr. Moody is to pronounce this Virginia river OCK-koe-kwan. The “Occoquan River takes its name from syllables in the indigenous Doeg language…and mean the end of water.
We are taken on a trip through the surrounding country, and through time to a less gentle era. We will meet “Agnes in Brentsville,” hanged for killing her master. And Harriet Newby, owned by a doctor in Brentsville who wrote her husband, Dangerfield, who joined John Brown’s attempted seizure of the armory. Dangerfield was the first casualty. And we meet other people, in other times in the country of that era.
Some poems will make you cry, and some will make you angry. These poems are history, and not for the faint of heart. In Age of Consent, Virginia, 1901, we learn of a girl whose daddy gave her consent for a few coins to any man who wanted her. All these poems are not about the dark slaves of Virginia, some are about the white ones, the ones who were not quite human enough to vote, until they paid for that right. Inez Scouts the Tombs, “Tonight she prays / the ghost breath enters her; her tongue, tomorrow, becomes / unbridled; her teeth, free forged…”
These poems are well-written, and accessible to anyone who cares to pick the book up and read whether they like poetry or not. They are about the enslaved Africans, the suffragettes, a child sold by her father. They are about people who lived, and died, and helped define who we are today. They are also about place and time. They are hauntingly beautiful.
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