The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry

If daring and argument forge identity, Stanford professor Rampersad (Life of Langston Hughes) has succeeded in ""allowing black poets to create with their own words a portrait of the African-American people."" Neither consonant nor cautious, the diversity of the anthology's subject matter is trumped only by its poetic range: Amiri Baraka's and Sonia Sanchez's experimentation vibrate against the classic lyrics of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, mixing visions and trading trials. The anthology, arranged by theme rather than author or time period, simultaneously grounds and sets the reader adrift in a terrain stretching from the American South to Africa, from the contemporary back to slavery. And yet, as Eugene B. Redmond counsels in ""Highflown: Love,"" these poems speak of ""A power that cannot be seen / Heard / Or flattened to fit the pages of a book"" and ask questions that define a people: Joseph Seamon Cotter asks, in a poem by the same title, ""Is It Because I Am Black?"" only to be answered pages later by Fenton Johnson in ""Tired,"" ""It is better to die than to grow up and find that you are colored."" And yet, it is this discovery that elicits other poems' celebrations. The power of this anthology is its capacity for holding out both visions to its readers.