Four Days in Algeria

Clarence Major’s Four Days in Algeria is a poetic feast of travel taking us to Paris, Florence, Ghana, Algeria, and many other places. We also experience the seasons in fresh ways. Delicious food, too, is laid before us. There are quiet moments, as on a houseboat, where the poet is writing poetry. Major gives us adventurous encounters with ordinary life rendered through poems of dazzling agility and fearless bluntness. These are also poems of unfettered Augustan honesty. They radiate with lyrical purity. Allegorical and spontaneous, they are full of holiday energy as the poet passionately affirms life, whether as he travels or simply in quiet moments of reflection.


ADVANCED PRAISE

“The deep cinematic beauty and elegant directness that has made Clarence Major’s work so essential for decades to readers and writers of poems is on full display in Four Days in Algeria. In this engrossing and endearing book, we are whisked away on adventure after adventure—the poet is a globe-trotting griot, and we are blessed to travel with him—to see, sense, taste, smell, and love the world wherever he encounters it. This is a book full of delicious and sensual surprises. Clarence Major’s poems are a feast to be reckoned with, and it’s an honor to follow his global footsteps in this masterpiece of a book.”—Allison Joseph, author of Lexicon and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman

“Four Days in Algeria strolls and accumulates its way, layer upon layer, until it catches “the intensity, the throbbing of life” only poetry, and a writer of this skill, can craft. What an uncanny world Clarence Major sings. A very powerful book!”—Cornelius Eady, author of Hardheaded Weather and Brutal Imagination

“Radiant with attentiveness and loving compassion, every poem in Four Days in Algeria brings the world closer, simultaneously embracing both the other and the reader with knowledge and tenderness. ‘Sunlight pours in’! Such a beautiful book!”—Rikki Ducornet, author of Brightfellow