Review: A Wreath for Emmett Till

The Book: A Wreath For Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson

The Blurb: In 1955, people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention. Award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the boy whose fate helped spark the civil rights movement. This martyr’s wreath, woven from a little-known but sophisticated form of poetry, challenges us to speak out against modern-day injustices, to “speak what we see.” (blurb courtesy of GoodReads)

The Review: This is an old book, though new to me. The story it tells and the moving way it tells it is well worth a review, but what I want to talk about is the structure. Emmett Till’s story is told in a heroic crown of sonnets. A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. A crown of sonnets is a sequence of fifteen interlinked sonnets in which the last line of each is the first line of the next and the final sonnet is made up of the first lines of each of the preceding fourteen poems. 

Nelson writes in her introduction that using the strict form allowed her to protect herself from the intense pain of the subject matter and freed her to follow her muse further into the piece. How fascinating is the idea that creating within a rigid framework might actually set an artist free?

Nelson weaves through this crown various references to flowers - forget-me-nots, rosemary for remembrance, poppy, bloodroot, queen Anne’s lace. Beauty played against pain honoring the tragedy that helped spark the civil rights movement. 

Pick up at copy on Amazon or Indiebound.

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