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    Carver: A Life in Poems
    Carver: A Life in Poems
    Carver: A Life in Poems
    Audiobook1 hour

    Carver: A Life in Poems

    Written by Marilyn Nelson

    Narrated by Lynnette R. Freeman and James Shippy

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Something says find out
    why rain falls, what makes corn proud
    and squash so humble, the questions
    call like a train whistle …

    George Washington Carver was determined to help the people he loved. Born enslaved in Missouri, he left home in search of an education, eventually earning his master’s degree. When Booker T. Washington invited Carver to start the agricultural department
    at the all-Black-staffed Tuskegee Institute, Carver found his calling. He spent the rest of his life seeking solutions to poverty among landless Black farmers by developing new uses for soil-replenishing crops such as peanuts, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes. Known for his
    achievements as a botanist and inventor, Carver’s quest also led him to become a gifted painter, musician, and teacher. This collection of poems by award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson paints a compelling portrait of Carver’s complex, profoundly devout life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateDec 13, 2022
    ISBN9781705078242
    Carver: A Life in Poems
    Author

    Marilyn Nelson

    Marilyn Nelson is the author of Carver: A Life in Poems and Fields of Praise. She has won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, a Newbery Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor. Marilyn lives in Storrs, Connecticut, where she is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut.

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    Reviews for Carver

    4/5

    58 ratings5 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Beautiful written. We used this in our history curriculum for 7th grade.
    • 4/5
      Does just what it says on the tin - tells Carver's life story in verse. It takes a particular kind of poetry to grab my attention, and this isn't it, but I willingly admit that that's my own shortcoming and no fault of this book.
    • 3/5
      7-8th grade, read during black history month, couple of poems on God could read for discussion, how some one in that time period and those hardships viewed God and how times have changed ... how do we view God now?
    • 5/5
      This book of poems imagines various moments of George Washington Carver's life (and the lives of people he came into contact with), some pivotal, some quiet and contemplative. Many of the poems include short biographical footnotes—useful for signposting major events of his life. A traditional biography would be preferable for those wanting more details about Carver's life, but by the end of this book, I felt as though I truly knew him.
    • 5/5
      I don’t know if Nelson invented the format but for me it was a revelation. Arranged chronologically as signposts in Carver's life, nevertheless each of Nelson's poems stands alone. The opening verses, for example, relay the musings of a mercenary hired to hunt down a missing woman, Mary, and Mary’s infant son. The mercenary finds the boy, but not Mary, and is rewarded. That boy is Carver, and the mercenary’s tale of triumph and reward serves as Carver’s “origin story”. (We never hear from the mercenary again.) Nelson builds up a picture of Carver from many such poems: singular, isolated, most observing the man from distance. Carver is revealed to be amiable, curious, generous, and accomplished, but always a person apart.Nelson in her verse observes Carver's personal qualities, evoking images and tones, avoiding Biblical inventory of ancestral history, Homeric tallies of the dead and their deeds. Seemingly recognizing that most readers will be almost wholly unfamiliar with Carver's biography, however, she appends relevant documentary detail in occasional footnotes: bulleted almanac entries with the necessary detail for a fuller appreciation of a given poem. Not all poems need them; in one instance, a photograph explains an obscure reference. It was not wholly clear to me, in that first poem, what tale the mercenary was telling, or the significance of his hiring, until the poem’s footnote was read, but the story was in the poem, not the footnote.Typically Nelson's poems assume the perspective of someone not among Carver’s intimates. In this way the poems mimic the position of the book’s readers: outside looking in on a life, telling a story from what little can be known without having participated. There are several exceptions: perhaps three (of almost 60 poems). One is narrated by Carver, "My beloved friend", reading as though we've opened a letter intended for someone else. Another appears to quote from a different letter, then proceeds to observe the letterwriter without comment. "Last Talk with Jim Hardwick" is subtitled “a found poem”; whether wholly invented or taken from a diary, however, is unclear. I opened this book knowing no more than I learned in primary school: Carver was a black scientist who found countless uses for the humble peanut. Having read it, somehow I know Carver as a person brimming over with talent and insight, a man of science and of spiritual visions, all of this tempered by his gentle demeanor. I am all the better for meeting him.

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