Bloodlines by Fred D'Aguiar tells a love story of sorts between a white man and a slave. What began as domination leads to love and their child narrates the tragic tale. D'Aguiar doesn't spare the reader from the racial violence of the Antebellum South.

I haven't read narrative poetry for a long time but D'Aguiar's story telling and mastery of language and rhyme melded perfectly to create an often horrific story. It was authentic but also mysterious and magical. I definitely need to read it again, I think, to get more meaning. I would not have read this except for this challenge so thank you! ( )

An extraordinary poetic epic written in iambic pentameter octaves. The poem by turns weeps in pain, shudders with fear, sings with love and shouts with anger. D'Aguiar's strong verse encompasses all the elements of epic -- exile, war, love, death -- in a tale of slavery, the Civil War, and the struggle for equality and justice. The best way to illustrate his masterful range is to quote a couple of stanzas:

on war:

Death empties their heads of all they'd thought
and done up to that moment. They cannot take
their beloved memories being erased. They cry out
for death to stop playing with them and strike:
strike them down or let them live to return south
or north and surrender their guns for a rake,
saw and plough, and their arms full of a lover
again, heads emptied of hate no soil can cover.

on fear:

When darkness tears to the sound of the afraid,
when the voice peels the skin off the night
in a single blast, by mustering all the weight

of the body, the lungs must crumple
robbed of air, and burn from that brittle groan
whose deafening flare vacuums the lungs' ampoules.
Last thoughts calcify in the brain's catacomb.
The music of the blood stops stringing along, pools
and turns sour. Each pore on the skin welcomes
a long needle. The skin contracts and glistens
around the jaw. Blood fills the ear, blood listens.

on the unexpected gift of love of two old people:

She laughs, a soft chuckle, reserved for
times she believed would never arise;
warmer for him than he could ever
be for her, she guesses. But look inside
his head and she'd see the same desire
criss-crossing his mind: that he's alive
not dead, that he should pinch himself to prove
a slave's life could end in peace and love.

But the whole is far greater than the parts. Highly recommended. ( )