When I first started to read City Eclogue, it was very hard to read and understand. There were a few poems that I was lost and confused about. For example, the poem City Eclogue: Words for It, I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about. I think he may be referring to how in the city we try to combine nature and urban life but in the end it turns out to be different than what anyone expected. You have the birds and the beautiful flowers and then you have the smell of garbage and car exhaust that human waste produces. I also believe that he is talking about how we try to set boundaries on pollution like “No Littering” or cleanliness committees as a way to help keep the Earth clean but at the same time we try to use the health of the Earth as a way to hide the bigger sins that we commit.
While reading, I soon reached a poem called Sit In What City We’re In. This is one of the few poems that I can understand out of this book. It starts off with “ Someone may want to know one day how many steps we took to cross our street, to know there were hundreds in one city streets in one direction and as many as could fit between the land’s contours crossing lines.” This reminds me of a group of people who live together in the city and it may not be by choice. The speaker is referring to the future as far as I can tell and he wonders whether or not anyone may ask why these people are stuck living together in this part of the city. As I read more of the poem, I realize that this poem is about the housing segregation that African Americans faced before and during the Civil Rights Movement. In part two of this poem, he talks about how African Americans were looked at as something wrong and something that doesn’t belong in this world and how some African Americans would wish that they were a part of a different culture because they thought they would have a better chance at life.
Overall, I would say that this book is pretty good, even though at times it was very hard to understand. Reading the first half of this book gave me a taste of what to expect when it comes to the second half. While reading this book, I realized that this writer has a different writing style that I am not used to. Most poets you can tell what they are going to write about and how the poem is going to end. Ed Roberson, however, is a completely different story. Many of his poems were very hard to follow. I hardly could tell what the subject of some of the poems were or what was going on.
Briana N. Smith 