Some books are about a given subject; others track that subject, even as they spring from it. Luther Hughes’s A Shiver in the Leaves is in the latter category, springing from, tracking, enacting many subjects, among them: the conundrum of being young, Black, and queer at this particular moment in time (specifically, this time of increased transparency about police violence toward Black people, this “era” of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, George Floyd, of Black Lives Matter); the impulse toward tenderness in the context of violence, and toward violence in the context of tenderness; flight versus falling; depression and suicide versus something like hope, possibility, the belief in. The strength of these poems is in their honesty about these subjects, their ongoing wrestling with them rather than vanquishing them. Hughes understands that conquest is ultimately not an end but a resting-point, from which to prepare for the next onslaught; instead of victory, resilience—if we’re lucky, with enough practice—becomes its own victory. Such, ultimately, is the luminous hope that these poems offer.
A governing image across the book is the black bird (as opposed to blackbird), most often the American crow, which in the opening poem (“Tenor”) is associated with blackness—not just the color, but the race. The crow becomes itself a conundrum, an instance of blackness that can fly, immediately raising the problem of how to be Black in America is to be routinely thwarted from metaphorical flight, from the opportunity to rise and succeed. Hughes asks:
Can you imagine
being so tied to blackness
even your wings
cannot help you escape?
And the question helps explain the speaker’s state of mind:
I have wanted
nothing
to do with blackness
or laughter
or my life.
The association between crows and blackness brings two poets to mind, and puts Hughes squarely in their respective traditions. One is Robert Hayden, who in his poem “A Plague of Starlings” encounters an assortment of starlings (a black bird) that have been shot down on a campus—starlings often being considered nuisance birds, imported here and prone to taking over yards, and in this case, entire campuses. The context, though, for Hayden’s poem, is the Fisk campus, Fisk being an all-Black university, in the turbulent beginnings of the Civil Rights Era. This context makes it clear that Hayden has not just starlings but Black people—Black students—in mind:
Mornings, I pick
my way past death’s
black droppings:
on campus lawns
and streets
the troublesome
starlings
frost-salted lie,
troublesome still.
Likewise, for Hughes, birds are often a way to interrogate racism. Just as often, though, birds—black ones, specifically—are Hughes’s entry point for the existential aspect of Blackness, what it means to be Black:
If not a blackbird, something that was blackened
by blackness, with an animal understanding…
(“As the Fog Rolls In, Night Finds Its Footing”)
Here, I find myself linking Hughes to a second tradition, that of Raymond R. Patterson’s “Twenty-six Ways of Looking at a Blackman” (as opposed to a Black man), a sort of riposte to Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Patterson replaces Stevens’s whiteness-as-default with Black context, not as a way to discuss racism so much as to plumb the depths of what it means to be Black at all, to move through a world that can only see Blackness as other. Section IV of Patterson’s could very easily have been the epigraph to Hughes’s book:
Always I hope to find
The blackman I know,
Or one who knows him.
A close second might be section XIX:
There is the sorrow of blackmen
Lost in cities. But who can conceive
Of cities lost in a blackman?
Hughes speaks from both these traditions, Hayden and Patterson, and in doing so he argues for race as both subject and context—neither defining nor limiting—and the poems here speak finally to what it means to be alive and Black and a city dweller and a lover and a victim and a son, with a “thirst for tenderness,” blackness as eros, as “a forest to be lost in.” And always hovering—quite literally—is what the title poem addresses, the ways in which the forest’s intimacy has also often been the site of brutality—a shiver in the leaves could be the leaves themselves, could be the birds within them, could be the lynched body that hangs ghostly from the branches that the leaves adorn.
Yet this is a book of hope, of triumph, even as each day that we wake is a triumph over how things might have been otherwise. “Look at all my colors,” Hughes says (“Fallen Angel”), reminding us that black contains all colors, is in that way its own abundance. That abundance includes the erotic, the familial, relationships variously sought and regretted, relationships with others as much as with ourselves, the self as an ever-restless interior of light and shadow. That abundance includes, as well, the hard-won poems of A Shiver in the Leaves, whose music is finally, beautifully, brutally, Hughes’s own.
— Carl Phillips