Kirjahaku

Joy (Or Something Darker, but Like It), the first book of nonfiction by poet Nathaniel Perry, is a group of essays that considers poetry in the context of parenting—what poems and poets might teach us about parenting, what parenting might teach us about poetry, and also, what either of those things might have to teach us about simply being a relatively successful human being. While other poets have written about parenthood, few books consider how parenthood and poetry themselves intersect. The essays are affable and never technical, but take seriously the idea that thinking about poems might help us all think about our other roles in life, as parents, lovers, citizens, and friends. The book, in the end, imagines that this kind of insight is maybe one of the things most useful about poetry. It isn't, or at least doesn't have to be, always about itself; it can instead, surprisingly and wonderfully, be about us. Each of the twelve essays considers a different poet—Edward Thomas, Henry W. Longfellow, George Scarbrough, Elizabeth Bishop, Geoffrey Hill, Primus St. John, Robert Hayden, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, E.A. Robinson, and Belle Randall—and, alongside them, different concerns of parenting and living. Organized in chronological order, they track the growth of Nathaniel Perry’s own children who pop up from time to time in a believable way. Essays consider the idea of devotion and belief, the idea of imperfection, the small details we can focus on as parents, and the conceptions of the world we pass along to our children. Together these essays not only represent the author's personal canon of poets who have been important to him in his life and work, but also present a diverse slice of American poetry, in voice, form, identity, origin, and time period.

Selected by Marie Howe from over one thousand submissions, Nine Acres is the winner of the American Poetry Review/APR Honickman First Book Prize. Taking their titles from chapters of a 1930s small-scale farming handbook, the fifty-two poems in this cycle create a handbook for living and explore sustainability on many levels--on the land, in the family, and in the spirit.As Marie Howe writes in her introduction to the book, "Nathanial Perry has collected poems into this book as one plants a field, as an act of husbandry: each line a furrow where seeds flourish or fail. Husbandry--to create a dwelling place and to care for it--these are the ancient acts.""Soil Surface Management"I spent the afternoon breakingground. The tiller bucked and groanedat the job, but with each pass I sawa perfect blankness, like I'd been loaneda second life in which to growa third. The sun sat on its porchand smiled. I wondered if the dirtwould be enough, a kind of torchto set inside our lives to say, we'll grow our food like this, our planswill look like this --like soil squaredand measured into beds by a mansweating through his shirt with effort.In dirt is one life we can chooseto make. I spent the afternoonbreaking what I knew we'd use.Nathaniel Perry lives with his family in rural southside Virginia. He is the editor of the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review and teaches at Hampden-Sydney College.

A book-length poem in six sections, Long Rules takes readers to five Trappist monasteries in the southeastern United States to consider the intersections of solitude, family, music, and landscape. Its lines unspool in a loose and echoing blank verse that investigates monastic rules, sunlight, Saint Basil, turnips, Thomas Merton, saddle-backed caterpillars, John Prine, fatherhood, and everything in between. Looking inside and outside the self, Perry asks, what, or whom, are we serving? Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, this essay in verse contemplates the meaning of solitude and its contemporary ramifications in a time of uncertainty.

Ndebele History and Culture. South African People. Ndebele authority structures were similar to those of their Zulu cousins. The authority over a tribe was vested in the tribal head (ikozi), assisted by an inner or family council(amaphakathi). Wards (izilindi) were administered by ward heads and the family groups within the wards were governed by the heads of the families. The residential unit of each family was called an umuzi The umuzi usually consisted of a family head (umnumzana) with his wife and unmarried children. If he had more than one wife, the umuzi was divided into two halves, a right and a left half, to accommodate the different wives. An umuzi sometimes grew into a more complex dwelling unit when the head's married sons and younger brothers joined the household. Every tribe consisted of a number of patrilineal clans or izibongo. This meant that every clan consisted of a group of individuals who shared the same ancestor in the paternal line.