American literature is not only more than Hawthorne and Poe; it is more than English.
Long before the Harlem Renaissance, African American poets and their white colleagues were writing in Louisiana, in French, with a quality inspired and polished by a sense of poetic community. These were the Creole poets of the 1800s, creators of a body of work that is at last available in an English translation by renowned translator Norman R. Shapiro.
Creole poets have always eluded easy categorization, infusing European poetic forms with Louisiana themes and Native American and African influences to produce an impressive variety of often highly accomplished and always strikingly engaging verse. The first major collection of its kind,
Creole Echoes
contains over a hundred of these poems by more than thirty different poets.
The poems gathered here exhibit the Creole poets' wide range of theme, tone, and sensibility. Somber elegies, whimsical verse, animal fables, love sonnets, odes to nature, curses, polemics, and lauds all find voices here