The Study of Human Life

In “Dad Poem,” the last of the three poetic sequences composing Bennett’s third collection (after Owed), a poem is defined as the place “where the language of the material world collides/ with the divine.” An eyewitness to and interpreter of that collision, Bennett draws on lived experiences—new fatherhood, his own childhood, the stain of contemporary racism—“to dream of a world, some heaven,/ big enough for a black life/ to flourish.” The poet readily acknowledges “the pain we never knew we never knew” yet presents a powerful work of Black affirmation. “The Book of Mycah,” his remythologizing of the death of Malcolm X within the context of an all-too-contemporary neighborhood police killing (“Our overcoming is ongoing”) is a multifaceted prose-poem of striking depth and originality.