Love's
Instruments by Melvin
Dixon, Elizabeth Alexander (Introduction)
Melvin Dixon's poems are receptacles and
illuminations, anodynes and tropes, the distillations of a fully
lived and truncated life of study and experience. He has attended
to interior modulations, invested in the unseen. His only limit
was time: not enough for him to fully be; his ambition was
timelessness, the axiom of paradox, and transcendental simplicity:
all mere complexity and human grace.
-- Michael Harper
In the introduction to this book, Elizabeth
Alexander wrote: Tia Chucha Press is proud to have published Love's
Instruments, this last collection of poems by Melvin Dixon.
Dixon died on October 26, 1992, of an AIDS-related illness; the
poems in this book are powerful enough with that piece of
biography, but they accrue further meaning in the context both of
literature of this plague and the premature loss of their author.
Melvin Dixon grew up in Stamford, Connecticut,
and received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1971 and then
doctorate from Brown University in 1975. Throughout his career he
traveled the world, spending large amounts of time especially in
Dakar, Senegal, and Paris, France. He won many awards including a
French Government Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral
Fellowship, and a Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship from the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He taught at
Williams College, Fordham, and Columbia University, and for the
last part of his teaching career was Professor of English at Queen
College and the Graduate Center of the City of University of New
York.
Contemporary
African American Novelists by Emmanuel S. Nelson
(Editor)
The past 20-odd years have seen the emergence of a
significant body of African American fiction. Providing reliable,
thorough, and up-to-date biographical, critical, and bibliographic
information about that literature for advanced scholars,
undergraduates, and general readers is the stated goal of this
work.
The 79 profiled writers include major novelists,
such as Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman, as well as such
lesser-known writers as Steven Corbin and Dawn Turner Trice. The
word contemporary in the title is somewhat elastic.
Although most of the writers featured have written in the past
thirty years, several had their most prolific period in the 1940s
and 1950s. And although each author has written at least one
novel, some of them are better known for their poetry, plays, or
nonfiction. Forty-one of the writers are women.
Entries range from 4 to 19 pages, with most
encompassing 5 pages. Each author's profile begins with a short
biography. A discussion of the writer's major works and themes
follows, with an overview of the critical reception in both
popular and scholarly journals. Each entry concludes with a
bibliography that lists the works of the profiled author and
secondary sources for further investigation. The bibliographies
are not completely up-to-date. Although novels published as
recently as 1998 are included in several entries, others, such as
Bebe Moore Campbell's Singing in the Comeback Choir and
Gloria Naylor's Men of Brewster Place, are not, perhaps
because they were published too late in the year. The bibliography
for Alice Walker ends unaccountably in 1992.
The stated purpose of this book is to be a
"scholarly guide to the lives, works, and achievements"
of the writers profiled. Some of the entries accomplish this, with
thorough, perceptive analysis, although others are cursory,
providing little insight into the subject covered. The benefit of
a compendium such as this is that a number of authors are covered
in one handy volume, and some may be hard to find elsewhere. For
more prominent writers, both general readers and scholarly
researchers will be better served by other resources, such as
Gale's Contemporary Authors. -- From
Booklist
Melvin Dixon received his B.A. from Wesleyan University and a
doctorate from Brown University. He was the author of two books of
poems, Change of Territory (University of Virginia Press)
and Love Instruments (Tia Chucha Press), two novels, Trouble
the Water (Fiction Collective) and Vanishing Rooms
(Dutton), and a book of literary criticism, Ride Out the
Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature
(University of Illinois Press). Mr. Dixon taught at Williams
College, Fordham, Columbia University, and City University of New
York. He received a Creative Writing Fellowship in 1984. Mr. Dixon
died in 1992...
