cover image Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems

Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems

Michael S. Harper. University of Illinois Press, $34.95 (408pp) ISBN 978-0-252-02144-2

""Our mode is our jam session/ of tradition,/ past in this present moment/ articulated, blown through/ with endurance,/ an unreaching extended/ improvised love of past masters...."" Throughout his 30-year career, Harper has eschewed neither the personal, political nor the lyrical, but consistently forged a middle road from the multiple intersections of memory and experience, music and language, oppression and achievement. As this welcome retrospective demonstrates, Harper's progressive, improvisatory power respects a variety of traditions in the arts. His elegiac meditations on jazz legends such as John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Bud Powell are well known, and his use of repetition and lyric fragmentation displays the influence of not only that supercharged idiom, but the slower-paced traditions of African-American blues, gospel, and folk music. Harper's writing, however, derives only in part from these traditions, and the many finely honed narratives in this collection display the influence of poets as diverse of Yeats, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop. Indeed, the strength of the poems frequently resides in their uncanny ability to synthesize disparate influences into a singular American voice: ""The last view is the best,/ from the terrace overhang,/ with a toothbrush,/ seeing rock gardens and roses/ pool in cascading fountains:/ the Renaissance built on slave trading,/ Etienne proud of his lineage,/ Booker T's bookings humbled his beginnings,/ the abstract masks giving off power,/ its conjured being dynamized in my skin."" A testament to the scope of Harper's ambitions and masteries, this volume includes some engaging new work, helpful notes, and two brief essays, and should solidify Harper's reputation as an engaging, accessible, uncompromising keeper of the flame. (Sept.)