After Words Shirley Brewer 9781934074824 Books
Download As PDF : After Words Shirley Brewer 9781934074824 Books
223 The number of homicides in Baltimore City in 2010. 23 The age of Stephen Bradley Pitcairn, one of those victims. Numb, we watch the news from a safe distance. No personal blood is shed. Yet, beyond statistics lie human emotions-pain that cuts deeper than any weapon. Poet Shirley J. Brewer responded to the stabbing death of Stephen Pitcairn, who envisioned a career as a doctor. Instead, he died in the street just one block from Brewer's home in Baltimore's Charles Village neighborhood. Brewer gives tragedy a voice. In words both spare and poignant, she creates an awareness of the staggering ways violence robs everyone-families, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and society as a whole. In After Words, we grieve. Our sorrow is specific, for Stephen and the Pitcairn family. It is also universal-for every person whose life has been lacerated by crime. One knife, and we all bleed.
After Words Shirley Brewer 9781934074824 Books
Beautifully written, this is a moving and inspired collection of poems reflecting on the tragic murder of Stephen Pitcairn. The murder has troubled me for years, even though I didn't know him personally. As a mother, I can't imagine the unbearable agony of his mother, who listened on her cell phone as he was robbed and murdered thousands of miles away. Shirley Brewer was clearly also troubled by this image, and used those feelings to create this amazing cycle of poems. A very generous gift to Stephen's mother and to all those who remember him or mourn his untimely death.Product details
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Tags : After Words [Shirley Brewer] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. 223 The number of homicides in Baltimore City in 2010. 23 The age of Stephen Bradley Pitcairn, one of those victims. Numb,Shirley Brewer,After Words,Apprentice House,1934074829,American - General,Poetry,Poetry American General,Poetry by individual poets
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After Words Shirley Brewer 9781934074824 Books Reviews
“Beautiful boy,” begins Shirley J. Brewer’s After Words, quoting John Lennon. And Stephen Pitcairn was beautiful, as witnessed by the photos in the book. After the last of thirteen poems comes a quote from Charles Wright “Remember me, speak my name . . .” Brewer does that. She remembers, speaks Stephen’s name, and leaves me weeping.
Poems written over the period of two years bring the reader a bright image of Stephen and chronicle his meaningless death in ways I will never forget. Brewer writes from the point of view of a grieving neighbor, Stephen, his mother, the man who held him in his arms while he died, the moon that lit the street that night, the tree under which Stephen died, and the knife that killed him. Some sorrows never leave us. This one will always be with me as I reread Brewer’s incandescent book.
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"One knife, and we all bleed."
With each staggering step, Shirley Brewer's verse wounds the heart, finally releasing us from the despair of a young life cut short by healing us with her After Words. The collection made me feel as if my arms, too, cradled Stephen Pitcairn as he drew his last breath; my chest pierced by the same knife that plunged into his. Through her words, the velvet blanket of the night and the sorrow of the watching moon enveloped me. Emotionally heart-wrenching, yet strangely comforting, the collection is a moving tribute to Baltimore's 23-year old Stephen Pitcairn, aspiring doctor and beloved son.
Kerry Peresta
Author of The Hunting, available December 2013, (Pen-L Publishing); Vice President of MWA, Carroll County Chapter, Creator of The Lighter Side, humor column. She is currently working on her next book.
This volume of poems deals with the brutal stabbing of a Johns Hopkins medical student, Stephen Pitcairn, as he was walking home in Charles Village. It's nearly impossible to sort out the sadness, anger, and bewilderment anyone would feel when faced with such a senseless and horrific crime as this, but Ms. Brewer attempts this very task through her sometimes gentle, sometimes blunt poetry. The poems not only reflect her own views on the event, she puts herself in the place of the slain student's mother and Pitcairn himself speaking from the afterlife. Delving into the already remarkable achievements of this young man's life, you are moved not only by the tragedy but the thoughts of what could have been for this exceptional man.
Events such as this are sadly all too common in Baltimore, and I tend to dwell on the anger I feel toward the criminals who have so little concern for human life. Ms. Brewer, however, chooses to focus more on what Pitcairn chose to do with the short amount of time he had on this Earth and how his impact lives on with those that he touched. I never knew Stephen Pitcairn. Shirley Brewer never knew him either, although her work brings him to life for us. Through these poems, I feel better for learning his story. I'm sure others will feel that way after reading this book. Perhaps that's the best we can expect from such a terrible event.
This is a great way to use poetry as a lasting memorial and in this case an eloquent protest against mindless crime.
I read Shirley Brewer's new collection of poems, After Words, instead of watching the President deliver his annual State of the Union address. Because change does not come from those who stand and applaud (or sit and grimace) in our nation's capitol--it comes after one of us has fallen (or, to put it less delicately, is thrust down and under, stolen from us, really) and a community raises its voice, a thunder within a whisper, an undeniable dirge, a protest of the most profound kind--a speaking out of man against, and simultaneously for, man (as opposed to system, or existence). And Shirley Brewer is voice (not `a' voice, but `voice' itself) in these poems--her own, her village's (Charles Village), Baltimore's, where we all live and breathe, and, remarkably, she voices a remarkable, thieved-in-the-night-from-us young man, Mr. Stephen Pitcairn, whose life should have been an occasion for a different kind of poetry, but who's death here provides an occasion for Baltimore, through one generous and respectful poet, to confront itself (once more and for the first time). Shirley Brewer's After Words is a State of the Village, a State of the City, a State of our Struggles with the Poverty of our Imagination, Economy, and Silence. It is also the State of Poetry and the many roles this essential form, in deft hands, serves the Village and the individual in times when Silence is not acceptable. The headlines have moved on to others swallowed by the Poverty in the City, and no street tributes nor permanent markers identify the spot where Mr. Pitcairn left us (ripped from us), but here is this collection of poems when read aloud or quietly to oneself, or shared aloud from the poet herself, makes a permanent marker in the reader/listener, turning each of us into commemorations in the flesh, completing the walk home, and beyond, for Stephen.
Beautifully written, this is a moving and inspired collection of poems reflecting on the tragic murder of Stephen Pitcairn. The murder has troubled me for years, even though I didn't know him personally. As a mother, I can't imagine the unbearable agony of his mother, who listened on her cell phone as he was robbed and murdered thousands of miles away. Shirley Brewer was clearly also troubled by this image, and used those feelings to create this amazing cycle of poems. A very generous gift to Stephen's mother and to all those who remember him or mourn his untimely death.
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