Between Chance and Mercy

Between Chance and Mercy 

By James E. Cherry  

Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2024 

Paper: $17.95 

Genre: Poetry 

Reviewed by Jeanie Thompson 

Between Chance and Mercy, the latest poetry collection from Tennessee poet James E. Cherry, traces racial history and race relations in America, the COVID era, disturbing contemporary events, and personal moments of insight and longing. That’s a big buffet, but each poem is a personal narrative and also a mirror to our own lives. To read Between Chance and Mercy is to learn much about being a Black man in the Southeastern United States, past and present. This is Cherry’s most ambitious and complex poetry collection to date for the breadth and depth of subjects, as well as command of styles.  

The collection opens with a foreword by former South Carolina Poet Laureate Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy who states that Cherry’s “memorable poems enrich us with their brilliance, depth, delight, and haunting truth.” As we move through the book, we encounter that “haunting truth” repeatedly. Following Saloy, Cherry has included a poem by poet, activist, and LA poet Wanda Coleman. “Cherry, Cherry – a cento for Mr. James 8/7/2013” ends with a dedication: “Dear Mr. James, This is the first poem I’ve written in a year since my world fell away. The credit is all yours. Thank you.” Coleman, a longtime friend of Cherry’s, passed in 2013 from cancer. Coleman’s poem riffs “Cherry Cherry” – reminiscent of a sixties pop song – and sets up the push pull of love and loss, energy and lethargy, and “sunny days drunk with sound” in a classic poet’s lament that lays the groundwork for the collection. Coleman ‘s direct address sets up the community-building found throughout Between Chance and Mercy. These are not the poems of just one person but of many. 

Cherry locates poems in neighborhoods, in churches, at a lottery ticket window, cleaning up after a windstorm, during moments of COVID isolation, and in tribute poems such as “A Black Boy Was Here,” written for the Gil Scott-Heron historical marker dedication in Jackson, Tennessee.  

In 2001, Cherry started the West Tennessee Griot, a black writing collective that has recently produced some ambitious programs in poetry and music, bringing out-of-state writers (Black and white) to read and share. Social consciousness and community action are apparent in Cherry’s work. Although he has deeply introspective poems, such as “60th” which begins, “I woke up on my 60th birthday and knew / I was going to die. Like my father / two nephews, two brothers in law,” he also includes some fantasy poems such as “I want a UFO,” which has the quotable line, “And who buries a planet / when it dies ….” 

Cast in strict tercets, the title poem, “Between Chance and Mercy,” begins with a man straightening his necktie before he drives to a liquor store to buy lottery tickets on Sunday morning. He then drives across town, propelled by the weight of responsibilities, to the Methodist church where he will “mouth scriptures, revisit old hymns, / kneel at the altar, / his outstretched hand trembling.” The speaker is somewhere “Between Chance and Mercy” fairly early in the tale-telling, admitting he straddles the fence. We trust this voice because he isn’t pulling anything on us. He’s honest and respectful of others, and his heart is open to the world. Also a prize-winning novelist, Cherry brings the fiction writer’s eye for detail and narrative to his poems as he writes for scene and interaction of similar, as well as disparate, souls in a close-knit community. Several poems are set in a public library– that oasis of freedom, learning, and community. Ironic that these were written before the current assault on public libraries in our hometowns.  

One of Cherry’s gifts is his ability to render a current moment in verse. An example is “Poem for Tyre Nichols,” set in Memphis: “At the corner of Castlegate & Bear Creek / …it’s the same slave block howl / after the auctioneer’s gavel, southern shrieks, / from rope and gasoline,” and he ends the poem asking  

How does a black mother forgive 

 herself for delivering a black baby 

 boy to the altar of America 

 

except she pluck a handful of sunset  

from the Memphis horizon, hold on 

until a light gives birth to itself? 

Some of the strongest poems in the collection happen when Cherry depicts scenes such as the “dark hand” of a woman who scaled the Statute of Liberty on July 4, 2018, in protest; an urban rap lament about imaginary signs on the “the House of God”; and the heart-breaking “The Segregated Word,” about visiting his town’s public library as a child, being told to return to the “Colored Section” with his sister, and being called the “N” word.  A deep, deep scar remains, and yet he is a poet. 

Other admirable poems touch on the history of Black poets in America, overcoming racial terror as he attempts to enter the Southern literary landscape, a history that catches him somewhere between shaking hands with William Faulkner and Emmett Till’s ghost.  

Two persona poems bear singling out.  “Eliza Woods” was composed for the occasion of the Equal Justice Initiative’s soil-collecting ceremony in Jackson, Tennessee, and the installation of a plaque there in Wood’s memory. Cherry rises to his best in this historical persona mode when he addresses Woods in second person and tells the horrific tale of her vigilante death by multiple layers of torture and even the mutilation of her corpse. Anyone who wants to understand what “racial terror lynching” means should study this poem. Another fine poem in persona is “Shannon Street Speaks” with its invocation of bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson in Jackson, Tennessee. 

Cherry ends his book with a poem by New Orleans poet, author, film-maker, and activist Kalamu ya Salaam. “A Reply to Brother James E. Cherry” illuminates the title of Cherry’s book. Salaam begins, “There is no chance // Life will have mercy on us.” Cherry intentionally gathers his poetic tribe, reaching out to sisters and brothers for solace and support. His poems give what this reader wants all poetry to offer – heartfelt images, impelling narrative, and a sense of place and community depicted with irony and wry humor. Please read and get to know Cherry’s poetry if you don’t already. His is a voice in our American poetry community, and our Southern poetry community, that you will come to trust for its skill, humanity, and grace.  

Jeanie Thompson is a poet, literary arts consultant, and Emerita Executive Director of the Alabama Writers’ Forum. Her latest book of poems is The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller. Her essay “The Generous Becoming” appears in Old Enough: Southern Women Writers and Artists on Creativity and Aging.