D. H. Melhem
Welcome to my home page. Look for a completely revised site, coming soon!
www.dhmelhem.com
Just published by Syracuse University Press! Available from the Press, Barnes & Noble, and other fine booksellers.
on 94th street
on 94th street
rain upon snow the long summer long
where footsteps tire and tireless the track
of wheels and window-washing
over cracks that rattle carts
and carriages of babies flying down
a hill of stillness shouted into dark
to everyone who hurrying along will
shuffle back no ending starts and
stirs again alarming moans and
calling out of tune will ruin
silences the sweep of sun one touch
is touching one is touching it
a friend of evening
with you
from Notes on 94th Street, in NEW YORK POEMS
(Syracuse University Press,
Spring 2005).
See website below at entry for Notes.
I’m happy to announce the publication of NEW YORK POEMS, my seventh collection. It includes my first book, Notes on 94th Street, which was the first book of poetry published in English by an Arab American woman. Manhattan’s Upper West Side was again my muse for Children of the House Afire, also included in New York Poems, with several pieces revised.
NEW YORK POEMS further examines the city from the World Trade Center disaster in the sequence “Requiescant” to the present and beyond. The preface gives an overview of the changes from “little Olde New York” to its post-9/11 survival. A new poem, “Prospect,” examines the urban terrain with a critical yet loving gaze. See below for reviews. See excerpts from the poems and early comments at the entry for NEW YORK POEMS and Children of the House Afire. (Reviews also at the website of
Syracuse University Press.)
The new photo above is by Lorraine Chittock. I thank her and Saudi Aramco World, in which it appeared (Spring 2005).
RECENT & UPCOMING EVENTS
A detailed list is below. You can also get information from the New York State Lit Tree website--click on link and go to "Circuit Writers."
New York State Lit Tree
March 24. “Roles & Rolling Pins: Mothers and Daughters.” D. H. Melhem, Rochelle Ratner, Jocelyn Lieu, Karen Malpede, Corinne Robins, Sapphire. A reading hosted by Dorothy Friedman August. Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia Street, Manhattan, 6-8 pm. $6 includes one drink.
April. Book launch: Stigma & The Cave: Two Novels. Books II and III of trilogy Patrimonies. (Book I: Blight). Syracuse University Press.
May 11. Philbrick Poetry Award ceremony. Both Philbrick Poetry Award winner and contest judge D. H. Melhem will read at the Providence Athenaeum, 251 Benefit Street,7 p.m. Free and open to the public. Reception.
May 18. Reading at RAWI Conference, with Iraqi poet Fadhil al-Azzawi. Arab American National Museum, 13624 Michigan Avenue, Dearborn, MI. Evening.
June 15-22. IWWG Annual Summer Conference, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Workshop: Poetry One-on-One. By appointment.
June 19. Stigma & The Cave: A reading and signing. Skidmore Shop, Case Center, Skidmore College. 12:30-1:30 pm.
Recent & Upcoming Publications
Forthcoming Spring 2007 (Syracuse University Press)-- STIGMA and THE CAVE: the final two novels in the trilogy PATRIMONIES, begun with BLIGHT, also distributed by Syracuse University Press.
Forthcoming in 2007, Patches of Light bilingual chapbook (Russian and English), translated by Aleksey Dayen.
NEW YORK POEMS (comprising Notes on 94th Street, Children of the House Afire, "Requiescant" section of Conversation with a Stonemason, and new work), published by Syracuse University Press, Spring 2005.
Interviews with D.H. Melhem appear in Saudi Aramco World (March/April 2005), online at
Syracuse University Press,
www.saudiaramcoworld.com
, and in A Gathering of the Tribes, online at
www.tribes.org
.
Conversation with a Stonemason received a highly favorable review by Matthew Paris in Home Planet News, issue 52, 2005. Paris writes of D. H.'s "lapidary craft" and her "large global humanism that is absolutely unsentimental and does not shrink from any uncomfortable notion....As a consequence this is very singular poetry. It can inspire us to be as brave in thought and craft as D. H. Melhem herself."
An extensive book review of Conversation with a Stonemason appeared in American Book Review, March-April 2004. Reviewed by Mary Giaimo. Another highly favorable review appears in Al Jadid, Vol. 10, Nos. 46/47. Reviewed by Rim and Razzan Zahra.
“Vasily Vereschagin’s ‘Defeated: Service for the Dead,’” Home Planet News, No. 56, Winter 2007.
“Rant Inspired by Frank Rich: ‘We Do Not Torture’ and Other Funny Stories,” Nightsun, No. 25, Fall 2006.
"Boo!" is published in Mizna, Vol. 7, Issue 1 (2005). "Comedy and Satire" issue.
"Delivering Mail in Fallujah" appears in issue 52 of Home Planet News.
"Artillerymen in the Shower" appeared in the January 2005 online issue of
Poetrybay.
New collection: Conversation with a Stonemason (IKON, New York, September 2003).
Anthologies: Off the Cuffs: Poetry by and about the Police, ed. Jackie Sheeler (Soft Skull Press, 2003); Tokens: Contemporary Poetry of the Subway, ed. Peggy Garrison and David Quintavalle (P & Q Press, 2003); The Company We Keep, ed. C. Furber, E. Ivy, R. Maldonado (Poet Warrior Productions, 2003); You Are Here: New York City Streets in Poetry (P & Q Press, 2006); forthcoming: The Tsunami Relief Poetry Book; Wild In Our Breast For Centuries: Women and the Returning Realities of War (Fulcrum Publishing).
"The Coal Bin," short story in Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction, ed. Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa (University of Arkansas Press, 2004).
About My Work
In more than 30 years as a published writer, I’ve written seven books of poetry, one novel, two critical works on Black poets, and a creative writing workbook. I’ve also provided chapters in 10 books, including critical works and an encyclopedia, had a musical drama produced, and published over 60 essays. I’ve read across the country, in venues ranging from the Library of Congress and New York’s Town Hall to libraries, universities, schools and cafes. Other projects and readings will be noted and updated from time to time on this website.
Looking for my books? You can find them online at www.amazon.com and www.bn.com.
Amazon.com
Barnes and Noble
Out-of-Print titles can be found at www.bibliofind.com by searching for D. H. Melhem.
Bibliofind
My work in Critical Studies is published by the University Press of Kentucky.
University Press of Kentucky
Poet Gwendolyn Brooks Observes:
“D. H. Melhem is one of our brilliant contemporary talents. As a writer she is serious, fervent, meticulous. She possesses one of the most remarkable minds of our time.”
My Bio
D. H. MELHEM, daughter of Lebanese immigrants (with paternal Greek ancestry) was born in Brooklyn. Having written since the age of eight, she was graduated from high school as “class poet” and read an early poem about the United States to assemblies. At New York University she earned a B.A. cum laude and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Years later she was granted an M.A. from City College and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York, and has been honored with a Ph.D. CUNY Alumni Achievement Award and three Pushcart Prize nominations. She served on the faculties of Long Island University and The New School for Social Research.
Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where she raised two children, inspired Melhem’s NOTES ON 94th STREET and CHILDREN OF THE HOUSE AFIRE. Recipient of national and international prizes for her poetry, including those from Pen & Brush, The World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, Calliope, and most recently the Marilyn K. Prescott Award, co-sponsored by Medicinal Purposes, her poems have appeared in anthologies, and in major literary journals, such as Confrontation, Croton Review, Paintbrush, Pivot, The Formalist, and Colorado Review.
As a scholar, Melhem’s GWENDOLYN BROOKS: POETRY AND THE HEROIC VOICE was the first comprehensive study of the poet and earned her nomination for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Women’s Studies. It was published by the University Press of Kentucky (l987). Her HEROISM IN THE NEW BLACK POETRY(UPK, l990) was undertaken with a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and won an American Book Award in l99l. Of her more than 60 published essays, her New York Times Magazine article, "A Family Works a Miracle," earned a New York Heart Association Media Award and was reprinted in SCIENCE OF THE TIMES.
Melhem’s novel BLIGHT was published in l995 by Riverrun Press, the same year that REST IN LOVE, her acclaimed elegy for her mother, was reissued by Confrontation Magazine Press. A member of PEN, the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, Pen & Brush, the Poetry Society of America, Poets House, and other professional societies, she is a former board member of Pen & Brush and of RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers), whose first anthology, A DIFFERENT PATH (Ridgeway Press,2000), she co-edited. Melhem is also a contributing editor of HOME PLANET NEWS. She currently serves as Vice-President of the International Women's Writing Guild and gives writing workshops at their Annual Summer Writing Conference at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.
International Women's Writing Guild
Her musical drama, CHILDREN OF THE HOUSE AFIRE, based on her New York poems, was produced at Theater for the New City, New York, in March l999.
COUNTRY: AN ORGANIC POEM (Cross-Cultural, 1998), her fourth book of poetry, is a book-length sequence about the United States. POEMS FOR YOU, a chapbook, followed (P & Q Press, 2000). CONVERSATION WITH A STONEMASON (IKON, 2003), her sixth collection, was recently joined by a seventh, NEW YORK POEMS (Syracuse Univ. Press, 2005).
Please see individual entries below for descriptions of and commentary on these books, and above for NEW YORK POEMS.
P O E T R Y
New York Poems
Spanning roughly the past 30 years, NEW YORK POEMS revisits and brings to life the vanished and still-vanishing New York of the ‘70s and ‘80s, the gritty world of NOTES ON 94th STREET and Children of the House Afire, neighborhood struggles with blight and urban renewal, the poet’s diverse assortment of neighbors, her response to the World Trade Center’s "great square of chaos" and its martyrs.
The poems survey the urban terrain and conclude with a view of the current scene. Her publisher writes: “New York Poems is dedicated to ‘the City of New York: embattled, gallant, enduring’ by celebrated poet D. H. Melhem, who calls the Upper West Side her ‘muse.’” D. H. Melhem's sharp eye looks at neighborhood struggles with blight and urban renewal (chastised as “Negro Removal”). She examines her city from the World Trade Center disaster to the present to the city's future. New York Poems combines her seminal book of poetry, Notes on 94th Street, with her second volume about the neighborhood, Children of the House Afire, whose emblematic title poem describes a tragic fire she witnessed from her second-floor window. “Requiescant 9/11” (“let them rest”), a tribute sequence lamenting the martyrs of the World Trade Center closes Melhem's last collection, Conversation with a Stonemason. The author's preface and poem “Prospect” survey the urban terrain. Melhem concludes with a lyrical panorama of her city's dynamic changes.
About NEW YORK POEMS:
The power in this book is explosive. It has integrity. It also reaches out in all directions with civilized vigor. The moral effect of this volume is to invite the reader to emulate the poet in reflecting on one's existence in the aegis of a unique world such as New York with its diversity, swagger, and populist raucousness. This is a very lively book; it reads like a breathless and multi-faceted journal of lapidary notes. . . . This is the tome of one in love with her community.
One has come to expect of D. H. Melhem not merely craft in all classical and free forms but a singular talent for a sinewy rhetoric that sculpts beautiful sentences out of seemingly ordinary words.
--Matthew Paris, Home Planet News, No.55.
Another form of creative anthropology and sociology. . . .I would describe D. H. Melhem as one of the finest poets of this generation.
--Mary Sue Kessell Rosen, Faculty Member, The New School University, in Art with Words, Poetry Quarterly, March 2006.
Also see Rosen’s reviews on
Amazon.com
and
Barnes and Noble.com.
D. H. Melhem is a poet of affirmation and intellectual rigor. Her readers should be grateful to her sense of social justice and history in a book that celebrates the endless progressions of a great city.
--Colette Inez, Professor of Creative Writing, Columbia University, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Vol. 11, No.2, Summer 2006.
[A] vigorous anthology brimming with competitive, bustling New York spirit. The wide variety of verse forms offer a divergent look and feel, changing from poem to poem with free-flowing vibrance.
—Midwest Book Review, Nov. 2005.
New Yorker Melhem (Notes on 94th Street) here celebrates her native city by zooming in on the most mundane of activities, like eating pizza at the Formica counter or chatting with her unsociable cleaning lady. It is here, she observes, that "things are more delicate (and strong)/ within the edges of our expectations." Although absorbed quickly, the poems paint a compelling picture of a city made stoic by its tragedies.
--Library Journal (2005). Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Conversation with a Stonemason
Love, war, family, politics, art, nature, the city, marriage, divorce, death, travel, Arab American heritage, 9/11—all this from a noted poet who is also a distinguished scholar. “Self Notes” introduces us to her social sensibility, love of her West Side neighborhood, and devotion to literature. While “Cultural Exchanges” reveals her multiethnic interests, “Heritage” connects with her own Lebanese background, particularly through love of family and concern for war’s devastation. “Elegiac” mourns figures such as Eleanor Bumpurs, an Ethiopian child, and a mummy in a museum case. “Poems to My Former Husband” retrieves “a kind of gold / marked and thin / but fine for all that” from a relationship. In “Art,” the poet, who was once a painter and sculptor, addresses works of art in ways infused with her own concerns of family and politics. “Convergences,” the final section, gathers her diverse interests. Travels in Africa, California, Switzerland, a conversation with a stonemason in a museum photograph, Amadou Diallo, and the concluding “Requiescant,” a major cycle of four poems about the World Trade Center tragedy, reaffirm Melhem’s concerns for peace and a humane society (see "Niagara Falls," above). CONVERSATION WITH A STONEMASON, D.H. Melhem’s sixth book of poems, affirms her extraordinary range and depth.
About CONVERSATION WITH A STONEMASON:
...A visionary with an ingrained sense of history, this poet’s deep concern is social justice, but her love of visual beauty will not be denied. Melhem’s passionate witnessing to the world’s fullness gives us a poetry to be reckoned with. I salute her. — Colette Inez
In this well-crafted collection, Melhem, like a stonemason, has chiseled her forms so beautifully that every poem leaves a deep effect on the soul.— Issa J. Boullata
D.H. Melhem is one of our brilliant contemporary talents. — Gwendolyn Brooks
Copies of CONVERSATION WITH A STONEMASON can be ordered
through Small Press Distribution at
http://www.spdbooks.org
or call 1-800-869-7553.
Country:
AN ORGANIC POEM
From the Publisher:
"From the clamorous New York precincts of NOTES ON 94TH STREET and CHILDREN OF THE HOUSE AFIRE, from the immigrant heritage and sorrowing lyricism of REST IN LOVE, the elegy for her mother, COUNTRY dramatically extends
D. H. Melhem’s range. Not since the long narrative American journeys of Longfellow and Whitman to the syncopated sequences of William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg has such a poem explored the surface and substance of the national soil and soul. History, Vietnam, the immigrant dream, landscapes of failure and fulfillment lattice the themes and motifs of this visionary work, an American epic in progress since 1972 and hailed early on by poet Barbara A. Holland as 'the organ voice of the United States.'"
Some COMMENTS on COUNTRY:
“An immensity: something oceanic….This book leaves no room, so to speak, because, including everything, it has no need to make room: It is all room, space, ‘country.’… The language is gorgeous, large, magisterial, flecked with small surprises and intricate mysteries—and always, always heartfelt, electric, touching….An achievement. A sculpture. A thing that has body and casts a shadow. And overshadows….The book is amazing. I continue to feel stunned.”
-- CYNTHIA OZICK
“What a geography of the mind and heart this new work of D. H. Melhem is….She has written a hymn to humanity’s shifting gears of behavior and activity…inspiring in its inclusiveness and awareness of human contradiction and constancy.”
-- MARTIN TUCKER
“D. H. Melhem is a poet of exceptional sensibility and artistry…The originality of her observations of nature, people, cities, is as precise and sprightly as Elizabeth Bishop’s….In this proud work, deeply aware of American failings, she nevertheless affirms the American spirit as her heritage, the American language as her native tongue.”
-- EDMUND PENNANT, Confrontation
“COUNTRY is the terra firma of love and excitement…a master poem in the true sense of the term.”
-- TALAT S. HALMAN
“I admire COUNTRY, the sweep of it, the varied rhythms and forms of your praise and irony (‘Where America Shops’ is fantastic)…. It’s a big ambitious book. Bravo. Bravo.”
-- COLETTE INEZ
“COUNTRY is a masterpiece of fresh, lively form and imagery.”
-- CHARLES GUENTHER
from COUNTRY (Part One, 57 Sections)
I sing the generous dead who live with me
companionate their silence fills the still page
of my day
body is deficient loud metamorphic
cannot be long held
yet I praise toward our speechless act
conversations printed
2.
George Washington
you have addressed me
in the resonance of your portrait
the marble statue your conscience
a vein in stone pulses
the temple your brain
columns that span rivers
18.
to write the country
as a poem
incomplete
is the truth
of geography
43.
pimp
did anyone love you little
or hate you then?
is commission your contact?
are power and poverty
so mixed in you
that the girl
you subdue
who trusts you
to protect
her small interest
is your pride
the tarnished iridescence
of a hatband?
Rest in Love
Confrontation Magazine Press, l995 (reissue)
A book-length elegy for the poet’s mother, describing a loving relationship, its terrible loss, anger, and healing.
“This is a major work.”
– VINIE BURROWS
“D. H. Melhem is a superb poet…. Nowhere more is this demonstrated than in the recently republished elegy for her mother, Rest in Love….The following gem, magnificent even without a setting, appears toward the close of this journey of loving memory:
I am the life my mother wanted
I feel her in my womb
that wise child
hand on her knee
remembers textures
step remembers
her direction
face in my hands
longs for her lap
even her apron
loved me
What a mother to have produced such an artist! What an artist to have produced such a mother!"
– SARAH E. WRIGHT, American Book Review
“D. H. Melhem achieves the transubstantiation of remembrance into well-crafted sound and sense. Courageous poetry….Some of the poems whisper a healing while others run their sharp edges through the reader. None of them disappoint.”
-- Small Press Review
“This blessed book touches me to the root of life and love. It is permanent. It will remain until the sun burns out and the planet goes dark.”
– CYNTHIA OZICK
“D. H. Melhem has range….Here she explores the personal universe of the family circle—the poetry of dailiness, the strong ethnic values of the poet’s Middle Eastern forebears.... No one has set forth so well the strong and beautiful bond between mother and daughter.”
– OLGA CABRAL
Notes on 94th Street
The Poet’s Press, 1972; 2nd ed. Dovetail Press, 1979 (out of print)
Bibliofind
This book, the author’s first, has been recognized as “the first poetry collection in English by an Arab-American woman” (see THE OXFORD COMPANION TO WOMEN’S WRITING IN THE UNITED STATES, 1995). The collection reveals the pathos and beauty of the poet’s Manhattan West Side neighbors and neighborhood. Greeted with universal enthusiasm, it received praise from many distinguished writers and critics. Here are some comments:
“This is the kind of poetry that strikes right to the center of the present-day situation and sensibility….The poems add up to a view of city life that represents a microcosm of modern urban man. Congratulations on a very successful book.”
--LOUIS L. MARTZ
“D. H. Melhem, like others of her generation, is bringing poetry back to a vigorous, beauteous, and too-long-in-these-quarters discarded function: a tool of Inquiry and correspondence and clear, true-functioning response. I am honored and excited to present her work.”
--from the Introduction by DONALD PHELPS
“The world she describes is not a pretty one, but it is a world swirling with passion, obsession and divine madness. Once she has introduced the reader to it, its power and its force inevitably, deeply overwhelm him.”
--from the Preface by MARTIN TUCKER
“D. H. Melhem is a nimble vigor, a roomy intellect, a sanity-searcher. She uses language with a canny shrewdness: she does not allow language to delay her messages.”
—GWENDOLYN BROOKS
from NOTES ON 94th STREET (“the street”)
BROADWAY MUSIC
The musicians at the newsstand
are singing
they sing and play instruments
the saxophone and cracked guitar
bawl and whine over exhaust fumes and garbage dust
they play and play the dirty black cap open between them
on the ground –
two old men for pennies.
And a big, drunken woman laughs
laughs over her balloon stomach
she pulls up her sweater to show it
the string holding up her skirt
hanging from the big white belly
she laughs through the spaces between her teeth
her mouth looks purple and half-vacant
when she opens it
she shows the old men her distended belly
as if it were fruitful or cherished
she lifts her paper bag to her mouth
like a trumpet – and drinks.
She is singing now, softly, then begins
a hard hoarse cry of a note
and holds it. She is singing –
a little wine left in the bottle
the flavor that was in it
a harsh joy in the emptying
And the old men sing with her
they dream through the curving wood and metal
and the forms of the sounds that go out
as if the dirty newspapers and today’s news
the people running up subway stairs
the dogs the pimps the hustlers the
gleaning-eyed girls, the howling police care
their bullhorn commands, the litter
and dust-filtered daylight
as if these held the moment of art
as if it could be mad
from the unlovely flesh, half-clay, half-dust
as if it could all be molded again, and the players
were gods empowering a new music
the big-bellied woman
and the musicians
at the newsstand
TOUGH BABE DOESN'T BEG
Tough Babe doesn’t beg
she says, gimme.
Gimme a quarter, gimme a dime,
gimme. Demands her due,
asserts
her worth to the street.
No Please. It isn’t a favor.
You’re not absolved by giving.
Something in your pocket
belongs to her,
she believes.
ON 94TH STREET
on 94th street
rain upon snow the long summer long
where footsteps tire and tireless the trach
of wheels and window-washing
over cracks that rattle carts
and carriages of babies flying down
a hill of stillness shouted into dark
to everyone who hurrying along will
shuffle back no ending starts and
stirs again alarming moans and
calling out of tune will ruin
silences the sweep of sun one touch
is touching one is touching it
a friend of evening
with you
UNNATURALS
he and he and
she and she walk
hand in hand
we rebuke them
(me and me)
BY THE HUDSON
I see the gray gull
above him an eagle I cannot see
limns brilliant passage
gull hovers hopes fish but
I am watching the sky behind him
wing distances dust me with light
the wind lives
FROM "BUILDINGS"
SCHOOLDAY
under my bed
by the wall
I hide from my mother
she is holding my sister’s shoes
mine are at drago’s
not ready
kids say
my clothes are
too small or too big
what somebody gave
I hate school
will not wear
the shoes of my sister
FROM "PERSPECTIVES"
IN THE PARK
I am in the park and
you are in the park
beset by fences twisted
sharpened at the top.
Swing high
I’ll catch you. Crawl
up the slide I’m
with you my hands
at your back.
I am the station
of handkerchiefs.
A boy in the sandbox
hits you
as I sit
with the news.
I see your fist
the future.
Hit back.
Tomorrow is
what it was.
CHILDREN OF THE HOUSE AFIRE:
More Notes on 94th Street
Dovetail Press, 1976 (out of print)
Bibliofind
This collection continues to examine the milieu of 94th Street. In 1999 it gave its title to the musical drama produced at Theater for the New City, with music by Grenoldo Frazier and book, lyrics, and additional music by D. H. Melhem. While several critics were put off by some of the strongly political poems, it received much praise. Like NOTES ON 94th STREET, CHILDREN OF THE HOUSE AFIRE ranges the lives and locale of the area and remains as a social as well as aesthetic document of situations and places that no longer exist. Some comments:
“CHILDREN OF THE HOUSE AFIRE is an ardent yet faultlessly disciplined poetic journal, which is given indispensable focus and dimension by the presence of the poet herself.”
—Donald Phelps.
“I think the collection is notable for beauty, music that is often agreeably muscular, warm humanity, and always, of course, MIND.”—Gwendolyn Brooks.
“Our city needs her….Urgency of love informs her. / Myth in radiant magnitude. / I listen for her poems.”
—Ree Dragonette, from “Five Poems for D. H. Melhem.”
“You have further internalized the cacophony of the city into your very being and into your poetic imagination. You are a people’s poet.”
—Vinie Burrows.
from CHILDREN OF THE HOUSE AFIRE (“Microcosm”)
PIGEONLADY
Pigeonlady
from the park:
bring birds
to this street
your index
they follow to
breadsack you carry
cast crumbs
bring birds
to this street
CHILDREN OF THE HOUSE AFIRE
To the seven children and three adults who died in the fire
at 311 West 94th Street, February 4, 1976,
and to the survivors
There you stand: empty building
with broken eyes
clay pots on your sills
plaster saints in a window
and a drapery fluttering burnt flowers
the residue of music, pots and pans
and families clustering to eat and sleep
behind the fire escape /
today smoke lingers here unseen
in the blood
Children –
flames were the red mountain of your cries
the cries of poor children who are heard too late
who huddle in a room for help to come
but the room of a house afire is the city burning
in rainless forest of devouring trees
and dispassionate frame and brick
with neat chimneys in a row
snub-nosed roofs against the invading air
Children –
you who wore a confirmation dress last May
gone to the white smoke clouds
after firemen’s hoses
gone to the black smoke raging your pain
gone down fire escapes crowded with
weeping and falling and waiting
Help is not a distant alarm
it reaches through the hands of neighbors
it covers cold flesh with a blanket
it finds shoes and shelter
for strangers thrown
to wet snow
Children –
you who have given to grief its undeserved portion
let your charred and monstrous gift yet give to us
a new way of seeing this street
may we hear its crowded sorrows
may the sound pour compassionate streams
upon all this burning city
and with a light of many colors
fill the gutted structures
where we live
PROSE > FICTION
Blight
A NOVEL
“As this unsettling fable begins, Joseph, a solitary, retired widower, is hoeing his garden when he discovers l0 gnomelike, bald, mushroom-colored creatures, each of then one foot tall. Growing in soil irradiated by nuclear fallout, the “ground people,” as he calls them, are a fratricidal bunch whose incessant conflicts mirror human callousness, greed and wanton destruction of the environment. Joseph falls in love with one of the elves—sweet-tempered, poised Ava—and sheds his cynical shell, reexamining his driven life and his neglect of his estranged son, Jason. Harry, one of the ground people, conspires to murder their tyrannical leader, Edam, in a plot that involves Joseph as accomplice….Illustrated with fey line drawings, this lyrical allegory raises basic questions about interspecies communication and cooperation, whether murder is ever justified, and how to heal our ruptured relationship with the earth. Melhem (Heroism in the New Black Poetry) is an American Book Award-winning critic, poet and novelist.
-- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“An amazing and original parable—enthralling and appalling, conceived in a poet’s crystalline prose and a humanist’s empathic courage….There is wisdom here—an indelible exemplum that will endure.”
– CYNTHIA OZICK
“Via the power of good sound and indelible images, high-flying fancy, serious introspection, canny analysis of today’s errant society, D. H. Melhem obliges us to consider some unpleasant facts about ourselves and our direction.”
– GWENDOLYN BROOKS
BLIGHT: AUTHOR'S PREFACE
In this garden of our world, what may not arise from the uncherished soil? We reproduce as we are, not as we may be. The forms engendered, artifacts of isolation, prepare their indigenous ground without comrades, without love. The weak, the wavering, the small or strange—who will welcome them when they, too, are nourished by a tainted earth? In the reality of our dreams, the borders of value can meld and merge into chaos, into death. But we may intuit, from time to time, that loving necessity which, in its power, retains the communal edge.
BLIGHT
Chapter I. Silence
It had occurred to me that something was wrong in my garden. I had already thinned out the calendulas and zinnias; my tomato plants looked healthy and my cucumbers, squash, and potatoes had started out of the ground; but the row of giant phlox and salvia was barren….
Prose > Nonfiction
Critical Studies
Heroism in the New Black Poetry:
Introductions & Interviews
Order from the University Press of Kentucky
From the Book Jacket:
Melhem’s clear introductions and frank interviews provide insight into the contemporary social and political consciousness of six acclaimed poets: Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, Haki R. Madhubuti, Dudley Randall, and Sonia Sanchez.
“If proof is needed that a ‘second Black literary renaissance’ is at hand, as poet Melhem asserts, then this rich anthology of six distinguished black poets should convince.”
-- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“D. H. Melhem, poet and biographer, is herself a ‘superstar’ in understanding and interpreting modern black American Poetry….An excellent introduction to these particular poets.”
– ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
“An important book. It deserves wide attention.”
– HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
Gwendolyn Brooks:
POETRY AND THE HEROIC VOICE
Order from the University Press of Kentucky
“Melhem’s study will help bring Brooks the wide attention and appreciation that she has earned. Highly recommended.”
– LIBRARY JOURNAL
“Melhem, in authenticating Brooks as a ‘major’ poet, achieves indeed a resource needed now.”
-- CHOICE
“Timely, enjoyable and useful….Finely arranged and executed.”
– ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
“A highly needed examination of themes and techniques of all of Brooks’s works. It is a valuable contribution to the Brooks scholarship.”
– JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE
“Thanks for pulling me into History…. Bravo!”
– GWENDOLYN BROOKS
