Saltwater Demands a Psalm
Kweku Abimbola
Reviewed by Sylvia Foster
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, Saltwater Demands a Psalm, out this month from Graywolf Press, exhibits Kweku Abimbola’s courageous willingness to explore all vectors of a life. These poems, which traverse the beaches of Ghana as well as the clubs of Detroit, are lively, witty, and devastating. From the first and titular poem, the reader is challenged to hold joy and anxiety in the same hand: “We owned a measure of horizon / and funked with the tide chasing it / during each morning catch— / …Before the barges came and scraped our reefs clean.” The poems that follow continue to move us through the incongruous: playful scenes unfold in poems such as “The Function” and “Stank Face”; moments of tension, such as being stopped by a cop in “A History of My Day,” streak through the collection just as boldly as the tenderness of a father teaching you to tie a tie, as in “Four in Hand.”
Abimbola makes police violence against Black people utterly central; each section includes a poem in remembrance of a specific victim, followed by a concrete poem made with the names of those who have been killed. Still, hope stands as an integral piece of Saltwater Demands a Psalm. Invoking a tradition of Ghana’s Akan culture, Abimbola gives each individual a new name, and therefore a new life. Akan symbolism makes its mark on the pages as well, as the concrete poems form the shape of the symbol of Sankofa: a bird with its head turned backwards, carrying an egg delicately in its beak, while its feet are planted forward—facing the past to make progress in the future.