ABSTRACT
Samuel Allen's poetry is a rich attestation of the power of witness to recover and transform the sense of self and alterity necessary to the creation of community within a space that is as spiritual as it is geographical. One finds in his poetry this ambient facility for dualities, often harsh, but ever responsive to the hope of final judgment and higher orders of conciliation. Poetry transmogrifies the historical Turner into a mythic Turner. That it may do so is a power belonging to word but only as memory may enact this process in imagination. Even physical gesture invokes a mythic presence of Tubman that memory seals in a time beyond time. The Homeric effect is deliberate and measured in a way that makes witness a moral and communal obligation. There must be something to remember, this poem memory links contemporary African American religious conversion experience to past rebellion experience.
