Master Poet, Shaman, an Otherworldly Archaeologist: A Review of David Mills’ "Boneyarn" by Melanie Maria Goodreaux

By Melanie Maria Goodreaux

In Boneyarn, (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021), David Mills works as a master poet and otherworldly archaeologist. Mills had to become this book in order to write with such eloquence. As author, he transfigures himself into the voices honored in the book’s dedication: “In Remembrance of the 15,000 unnamed enslaved and free blacks, indentured whites, and Native Americans interred in New York City’s Negro Burial Ground, America’s oldest and largest slave cemetery: 1712-1795.” Boneyarn serves as a brilliantly worded place of rest for these nearly forgotten souls, while shedding light again on the horrors of slavery and the polarities offered by its distinctions post mortem and with passing centuries. 

Mills’ work gives shape and exacting details to these lives--unearthing their humanity with keen poetic portraiture, and a sort of retroactive respect that is obviously well-deserved. Like a shaman, he literally “speaks to the bones” and the bones speak back. Through poetry, he illustrates this back and forth conversation for the reader. He brings us coffins, bodies, bones, their relatives, grave robbers.

He brings us wheels, nails, poles, and “ bloody billowing laundry.”  He gives us a somber visual feast with an intimate dialogue we would never be privy to had Mills not channeled these voices in conversation— posing questions like:  

What was it like to have graves without names? 

Come again? 

The answers are returned by voices that speak from beyond, created by Mills. 

Here is an excerpt from his “Talking to the Bones: Columbia Graverobber Victim” from the chapter that bears the same name as the book, Boneyarn:

Who did this?

Abuse’s students

Why?

Med’cin drives some men

to unbutton their monsters

But why put the crown of your head in the crook of your arm?

They sawed bone to what

they thought was thoughts

They discovered and exhumed for what?

Life had already taken my life

Med’cin  just cracked open its questions

His rhythm and profound metaphors roll out page after page— a chimney sweep’s ankles “swelled to black apples” and bodies have limbs that “dip like a fractured hammock.”  He calls the characters living inside this experience  “trapped caterpillars” and painstakingly names and describes the “unnamed.” And just when you might  think you’d need a degree from Harvard to work through all the historical references and depth— Mills generously includes notes with an explanation of the chapters at the end, which is just as fascinating to read. In Boneyarn, David Mills brings ancestor worship to new heights, whittling away poems that work as a history lesson by honoring the dead who could not speak for themselves. 

The book opens with a “prelude” that sets the foundation of the ceremonial story through poetry Mills is about to tell throughout the following chapters. We go from “Cellars and Attics,” to the “The Body Metropolis,” to “Stocks and Bondage: Wall Street,”— a section of the book were Mills brings us back to an auction block that would be held right “at the foot of this city”:

“In and around this southern structure, this

New England gazebo—looming— buyers

circled, eyed ballooning chests, smalls of backs

Scoops in flanks. Preparing for a nearly naked sale

a white middle and index finger nose along

a brow’s frightened horizon.”

I remember hearing Mills read poetry for the first time myself in the early 1990’s at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Poets on those electric Friday nights of our youth flashed by quickly on the stage like lightning and loud-mouthed exhibitionists offering their versions of truth. I remember David being a polished performer as the evening’s featured poet or sacrificial lamb. He moved the crowd with a poem and left people whispering about how he really lived at Langston Hughes’ house in Harlem, so the walls must have had some good effect on his writing. He even starts the book off with a quote from Langston Hughes, which reads, 

“ Ghosts of all to solid flesh,

Dark ghosts come back to haunt you now...

I am the American heartbreak”

—Langston Hughes

Flash forward thirty years-- Mills has written a book of poetry and a reckoning that reads smart, and is uncannily empathetic to the history of these enslaved people who were buried at this site, most with no markers. Boneyarn works as a selfless monument of art and history and reminds me of how one might feel about a church missal-- inside the thin pages are a work of ceremony, reverence, and story, keeping us connected with what and who is inside the covers. The book goes beyond shedding light again on the horrors and inequity of race relations in this “American heartbreak” but also includes incantations, benedictions, and spirit talk. The litany of queries presented by Boneyarn is moving, important, and takes its place among the best around working at the craft. In New Orleans, we’d say, “this book is so good, David Mills really stuck his foot in it.”

Boneyarn
by David Mills
Ashland Poetry Press, 2021
$17.95