A Toast in the House of Friends

This is a great book.

I felt desolate entering this book, searching for some traces of its author, of the wise, witty, empathetic woman she was in life. Hers is a presence gone too long from American poetry, and perhaps forgotten too soon. My students don't seem to know her name, that's for sure. But only a page or two into the book, and traces of Akilah Oliver already seemed to stir and wake in me both the great tragedies of her life, and the great gifts with which she was so amply endowed. Many poets have the knack for creative memorable chains of words across the page, and many poets can shape those lines to impressive open field structures. And many poets, if fewer, have mastered the verse forms of white folk and black, and a few have created their own language to talk to us in, as God is said to have done when he came whispering to Adam in Eden. And many of us have lived through sorrow and have tried to embrace it while repelling it in apotropaic forms.But Akilah's achievement is pretty well unparalleled. She had lost her son, and she brings him back through the pages of "Toast," Oluchi McDonald, not only as he was when he died, an adult, far away, and not only as a child, a boy in her arms, a baby, but seemingly through every stage of life. The poems of "A Toast in the House of Friends," in 98 exquisitely etiolated pages, are like panels in a graphic novel, each presents a pictogram which, flipped through one's fingers, produce not only tears but great shouts of joy and freedom, as she has managed to conqyer death, to find the past in the present, and to allow us to drink both of consolation and rage. Ghosts are "wearied world things,/ always in return," yet "sumptuous,"—"as if all things had origins in delight."Because his name was McDonald she parses for us the old folk song of "McDonald's Farm," with its squeal of vowels, e-i-e-i-o, some have said a death chant of the days when slaves worked plantations and looked to the animals for their cruel masters, but also a song of profusion that will never end, that will always intrigue the child just discovering how many different sorts of things there are, and always a new one more fabulous than the rest. Akilah Oliver was a singer of songs and a teller of riddles. She dared speak to the dead (one of the final poems extends her keen and wise seeing to the dead white Laramie student, Matthew Shepard) and sees that those who die before us leave us their gifts as well as their bodies, and if we listed hard enough, we are possessed of their brains and souls. "I have been an exiled orphan in the bright world for too long."

Akilah once told me to put the work out there and then let it go. This is exactly what she did in this manifesto of grief and friendship. Here you will find a courageous gift of such honesty and beauty that it sometimes reads like Akilah was channeling. One of the most graceful and mystical books I have ever read. Language is linear in some places and non linear in others, lyrical and full of intelligence.