The first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, Brooks (1917–2000) moved from early, formally intricate verse about American life, through a brilliantly jagged free verse attuned to the turbulence of the late 1960s, into a populist hortatory style that reached a very wide audience. Brooks prepared this new-and-selected volume shortly before her death; its titular sequence, published in Ebony
in 1971, has never appeared in book form. That sequence praises Alabama's civil rights workers, incorporating their speech and giving the flavor and the micro-history of that important period as few other poets could. The selection concludes with the pivotal, and critically admired, long poem "In the Mecca" (1968), a harrowing narrative set in a Chicago housing project. The rest of the book collects poems from Brooks's later phase, many of them about or addressed to the young; the sequence "Children Coming Home" consists of short, moving verse-monologues by boys and girls from Chicago's South Side. Other poems praise named individuals, from the social reformer Jane Addams to a deceased child to Danny Glover ("Danny Glover is/ a good poem"). An ode to Winnie Mandela ("the She of our vision, the Code") appears now as Brooks's last ambitious work, and includes a deservedly proud mission statement: "We blue-print/ not merely our survival but a flowering." (Oct.)
Forecast:
Because it is in effect a memorial volume, and because it includes poems not in Brooks's 1987 collected
Blacks, this volume could inspire widespread reviews: much depends on the distribution Third World (Brooks's publisher since the 1980s) achieves.
