The Vintage Book of African American Poetry

Rating:
Summary: poetry
Review: a collection of poetry from as far back to phillis wheatley to today, so if you a fan of black poets from older day, you can find some of their works in this collection

Rating:
Summary: The Vintage Book of African American Poetry
Review: An excellcent collect of African American Poetry. Never really been interested in poetry, but after reading this book can't wait to read more poetry any kind of poetry.

Rating:
Summary: The Vintage Book of African American Poetry
Review: An excellcent collect of African American Poetry. Never really been interested in poetry, but after reading this book can't wait to read more poetry any kind of poetry.

Rating:
Summary: 4.3 stars: A splendid anthology; please read
Review: The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, edited by Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton, is reminiscent of a somewhat earlier anthology EVERY SHUT EYE AIN'T ASLEEP (also edited by Mr Harper and Mr Walton). The poems in the Vintage Book span three centuries, from Jupitor Hammon and Phillis Wheatley, to Carl Phillips and Reginald Shepherd; the 20th century, as one might expect, is most generously and gloriously represented. This reviewer has always prized the work of Countee Cullen and of Robert Hayden; and is grateful to make the acquaintance of Sterling A. Brown and Gwendolyn Bennett (her poem "To A Dark Girl," written early in the last cnetury, is an irreducible greatness); Langston Hughes is shown to advantage in the selection of his work, many of the chosen poems being new to this reader. It shames us that hithertofore we had not been familiar with the work of Boston-born William Stanley Braithwaite. Claude McKay and Jean Toomer appear in these pages, McKay's finely wrought sonnets being familiar from other anthologies. New to us, and a gift for which the reader is grateful, is Margaret Walker's "October Journey," of Keatsian loveliness.

Stylistic diversity exists here, and surfaces in a salient fashion as we reach the middle of the twentieth century: Gwendolyn Brooks (both formal and colloquial); Bob Kaufman (can we cavil at the omission of his fine eulogistic poem "Afterwards, They Shall Dance"?); Etheridge Knight (whose diamond-like haiku enliven our sense of the possibilities of the form); and the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, whose "Bounty" is indeed a marvel. Raymond Patterson's baldly unsubtle imitation of Wallace Stevens ("Twenty-Six Ways of Looking at a Blackman") strikes this reader as a culpable generosity of inclusion on the part of the anthologists.

We find merit in the poems of Audre Lorde and Lucille Clifton; Sonia Sanchez's piece urging nuclear disarmament does not affect us positively, on either a political or an esthetic level, a slack garrulity that is too long-winded to be a slogan and too formless to be a poem. Jay Wright, Michael S. Harper, Al Young and Toi Derricotte (almost exactly contemporaneous) fashion lyrics of beauty, ingenuity, toughmindedness and considerable appeal. We value Marilyn Nelson's poem (charmingly sardonic) called "Emily Dickinson's Defunct." Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, and Rita Dove -- justly renowned poets -- are in the Vintage Book (Komunyakaa a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1994, Dove a recent U. S. poet laureate). Nathaniel Mackey's poems display an unparalled intelligence and ability to renovate and renew the language; his work should be more widely known. Elizabeth Alexander cages wrath within formality in "The Venus Hottentot", and is quite effective in her sequence of poems about Muhammad Ali. And finally, an autumnophile reviewer must congratulate Anthony Walton on the achievement of his lyric "The Summer Was Too Long"; great poetic force is also to be found in his poems on Thelonious Sphere Monk and Emmett Till.

In short, this is a splendid anthology, recommended to all. There are lapses into the ineffectual stridency of sloganeering; nonetheless, we venture to say that the reader will be nourished and fortified by the majority of the poems in the Vintage Book of African American Poetry. These are lyrics of immitigable beauty, of consummate artistry, of serious esthetic accomplishment.