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.


The Vintage Book of African American Poetry   March 30, 2000
A. Jones (Misawa AB Japan)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

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.