Title: Unseen Scars
Author: Martin Terrell
Publisher: Explora Books
ISBN: 9781998394784
Pages: 118
Genre: Biography/Poetry
Reviewer: David Allen
Hollywood Book Reviews
The deepest scars are unseen, according to author Martin Terrell, whose poems celebrate a lifetime spent variously as a Black man, as an American, as a child growing up in the inner city, as a convict, as an ex-con.
Yet despite these challenging origins, Terrell demonstrates with each poem how the spirit, girded by the love of others, the love of life, and the love of freedom, can transcend adversity and soar. The spirit, manifested here in the form of poem-angels sent aloft from Terrell’s sometimes doubting but ever heroic heart, reigns triumphant even when aggrieved. The poems are terse, rhythmic, they sometimes rhyme – and they always shine. Take ‘Rainbow Man’: I am rainbow man/Not like in Somewhere/Over The Rainbow, ‘Cause ain’t no bluebirds/Flying in my rainbow, Only birds flying/In my rainbow are crows/You don’t see ‘em/‘cause they’re black.
Martin Terrell’s message in each poem is pithy, punchy, hard to miss: life is tough everywhere, but especially so if you’re black. Terrell’s vision and wisdom are unsparing: his plaint for justice is sophisticated enough, and contemporary enough, to maybe include a poetic dig at the insurrectionists of January 6 (and/or to ghetto based cop-killers?): But you kill cops/Whose liberation are you fighting for?/What movement do you represent?/You sabotage protest…
These poems stand on the shoulders of giants, resonating with the consciousness-rousing essays of James Baldwin as well the fiction and poetry of emerging and growing generations of important Black writers. Terrell himself is a phoenix risen from the ashes, pushing back from a prison sentence to become Assistant Dean at the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio University.
The poems are far-ranging, going from acute and breathtaking descriptions of North Carolina clouds to descriptions of what it’s like to be taken for ‘brown’ or ‘colored’ in white heartland America. The man who wrote these poems has been through heaven and hell and back and he’s here to tell us that the trip is worthwhile for the sumptuous sights and inevitable and necessary fights along the way.
The poems are sometimes livid, sometimes entreating, always powerful. Pick this chapbook up to see where and how the best of creative and social impulses can flower. Unseen Scars by Martin Terrell is a thought-provoking collection that offers readers a deep and nuanced perspective on societal issues, making it a valuable addition to contemporary poetry.