A New Beginning

Authors: Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella Publisher: Peepal Tree Press (2019) When Speak from Here to There was published in 2016 it was, remarkably, doing something quite new. There are of course the conversations implied in the poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth, but no two poets had committed to, in the words of Will Harris, the almost daily “structure of call-and-response, each utterance is filtered through the other.” A New Beginning offers, as Karen McCarthy Wolf noted in her review of Speak from Here, the same “warmth and a reassurance … in the correspondence itself, between a black man almost but not quite marooned in the white of America’s Midwest, and a white man negotiating his own exile from the vast physical and historical dissonance of Western Australia,” but there is much that carries that initial dialogue to new depths of trust, self-exposure and intimacy, to the expression of new themes, concerns, and investigations of poetic form.  This richly multi-layered dialogue arise