SOURCE: Review of Whatsaid Serif, by Nathaniel MackeyPublishers Weekly 245, no. 26 (29 June 1998): 54-5.

In the following review, the critic reviews Whatsaid Serif.

Mackey's third book of poems continues the exquisite “Song of the Andouboulou” cycle inaugurated in his first book, Eroding Witness, and continued through his second, 1993's School of Udhra, also published by City Lights. With a poetic line that is syncopated and improvisational, yet balanced in an elegant, nearly classical style, Mackey sets out on a terrifying, inspiring spiritual quest, taking on cultural displacement and the ruins of communal identity. Like Eliot, Mackey is an elegist for a lost culture, but his historical fracture is not industrialized Europe, but the Middle Passage. Taking up the phenomenon of syncretism (the reemergence of African traditions in the New World after centuries of total suppression), Mackey creates a language that pun-fully subverts the language of Western myth: “C'rash it...