Splay Anthem

Splay Anthem is a poetry collection by Nathaniel Mackey that weaves together two serial poems he had been writing for more than twenty years, Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu. In the cosmology of the Dogon people of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are early ancestral spirits, and Mackey's song addressed to them works as both a funeral song and a song of rebirth. Mu carries many echoes at once, from Greek myth to a lost continent once imagined in the Pacific to the music of Sun Ra. Arranged in three sections, the poems follow a wandering collective we through dreams and waking life, across many places, cultures, histories and musical traditions, especially jazz. Mackey's long introduction also offers a sharp reflection on the United States of the early 2000s. Rich in sound and allusion, the book is for readers who enjoy ambitious, musical poetry. It won the 2006 National Book Award for Poetry.