| Catch the Fire!!! is no ordinary poetry anthology, but the record of a rite of passage: the handing down, from one generation to the next, of the torch of poetry and the story of African American experience, and as such it does burn, consuming pain and renewing life. Editor Gilbert, a spoken-word poet with an album produced by Quincy Jones to his credit, exemplifies the firecatchers, younger writers drawn first to poetry for its immediacy and performability, but staying for the long haul, the serious work of writing. Gilbert anchors the energetic work of these emerging poets with poems by and interviews with such trailblazers as June Jordan, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, and Quincy Troupe. Forman's debut collection, We Are the Young Magicians (1992), was dazzling, each poem a veritable fireworks display. Here, in her second book, her poems are like carefully banked embers. They are prayers--how-to-live and how-to-mourn-and-go-on psalms--exalted and timeless, mythic and giving. Beginning with a series of poems written from a child's perspective, Renaissance traces the life cycle as Forman pays tribute to her ancestors (both literal and metaphoric), including a profoundly wise and moving memorial to her mother; offers love poems notable for their determined self-respect; and presents a set of spiritual meditations on friendship, expression, and community. Jackson tells her readers right away that she's going to "work some voo-doo magic" on their minds, and she's not kidding. The selected poems that constitute And All These Roads Be Luminous are sinuous and inexhaustible exhalations, complex riffs rich in sensuous detail and resonant with psychological insight. Jackson reanimates myth and history, scrutinizes life from unexpected perspectives, and shares her keen irony, seasoned humor, and hard-won wisdom in poems that conjure diverse times and places, and tell many stories. Jackson imagines Eve and the dawn of language, and describes everything from making love to "syringe-thin" homeless men waiting in line for a meal, always confronting the thin line between life and death with great spirit and grace. Komunyakaa won a Pulitzer Prize for his last book, and Thieves of Paradise seems destined for its share of serious attention. The full weight of history is felt in these poems, sonorous works that echo the myths and revelations of many cultures but which revolve around the paradoxes of African American life. Komunyakaa gets inside language, achieving both a complexity and a naturalness of form, and reflecting a knowingness born of scholarship and imagination, experience and empathy. He brings out the soul of places as distant as the plains of Africa, the streets of New York, and a market in Hanoi, and creates a cast of indelible characters, from a wet nurse unable to feed her own child to a traumatized Vietnam vet. These people are wounded, and these poems, in spite of their sensual beauty, shudder like earthquake aftershocks under a primordial green sky. They are plangent and heroic and as enduring as the blues and jazz Komunyakaa so skillfully evokes. Rocks and bones are the main ingredients in Moss' unflinching, brilliant, long-lined poems, piercing diagnoses of maladies of the body and the soul. Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler, her sixth volume of poetry, is a book of extraordinary range, as Moss pushes through to the heart of myths and fairy tales; ponders the implications of the lives of the saints and today's prime-time tragedies; asks thorny questions about race, womanhood, sustenance, and death; and conjures the awesome complexity of any given moment. The "holler" of the title is the spirit's rallying cry in the face of pain or annihilation, either the warrior's shout or the prayer of a martyr. Moss seems to write in blood as she contemplates parricides and cannibalism, baptism and drowning, bombs shaped like breasts and holocausts, the microscopic and the historic, embracing paradox, reveling in mystery. Sanchez of |
