Background
Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell was born in Haiti and raised in Haiti, until age 10.
Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell was born in Haiti and raised in Haiti, until age 10.
She studied anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated from Pennsylvania University with an Master of Fine Arts
She also lived in France. East. B. DuBois Institute and the Center for the Study of World Religions all at Harvard University, as well as from the New England Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Tanbou, and Ploughshares.
She has donated paintings to the National Center of Afro-American Artists.
Just a handful of poems actually address the earthquake itself—perfectly understandable, given its recentness at the time of the Harvard reading. Among them, “Intersection” by Danielle Legros-George, Tom Daley’s “After a Stroke, My Mother Addresses Children in a Photograph of a Sidewalk in Portuguese-au-Prince,” and “Earthquake” by Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell deserve a special mention, as the most innovative in their imagery and emotional thrust.
In “Earthquake,” we read of the collapse of bodies and buildings, and see vividly the destruction wrought in Portuguese-au-Prince Brilliantly evocative contemporary stories about Haiti.. in Haiti, before the recent earthquake but no less steeped in hardship and spiritual overcoming, is captured in interconnected stories by a gifted Haitian American. The author"s empathy for her resilient subjects, and her grasp of the human comedy in depicting the creative ways downtrodden people keep hope alive, makes the book unexpectedly entertaining.
In contrast, one can, and does, find pleasure in Marilene Phipps"s first full-length collection of poems, Not the light, transient pleasure of a novel only suitable for the beach, but pleasure of the soul-satisfying kind.
The book invites deeper reading, rather than demanding lieutenant Phipps book has the tried and true stuff of fine poetry—remarkable images, striking metaphors, big themes—without being stuffy. lieutenant covers the full range of the human drama—its glory, its misery, its humor and its pathos.
An example is the somewhat-photographic composition of a man in white clothes paying his respects to the corpse under a sheet before a shelf loaded with statuettes and vases of flowers.
The drawing is sound and the colors juicy but the general effect is perilously close to calendar art