Selected poems Book

These poems focus on the lives of black people, poor people, elderly people, disabled people, soldiers. They do not shy away from difficult topics but do not sensationalize them, either: one piece, titled "the mother," begins starkly, "Abortions do not let you forget."

Brooks inhabits the characters she writes about with a stirringly absolute empathy. By shining on them the quiet light of her unostentatiously perfect prosody, she shows us that even society's most overlooked and alienated individuals are grounded by an inner framework of dignity, that the insides of even the most downtrodden are lined by a nacreous grace. (Something we should all already know but are all occasionally guilty of forgetting.) Yet, as tender as she sometimes is, Brooks can also be pungently wry, stingingly acerbic, especially when casting her eye on the varied manifestations of racism. Consider, for example, this stanza that she drops in an almost-offhand way into the middle of the long poem "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith," an Eliot-esque psychological analysis of a young black male character:

But movie-time approaches, time to boo
The hero's kiss, and boo the heroine
Whose ivory and yellow it is sin
For his eye to eat of. The Mickey Mouse,
However, is for everyone in the house.

With its craftsman-like attentiveness to sonic detail, Brooks's language sometimes achieves an intricately filigreed, rococo grandeur that puts one in mind of the master goldsmiths of past centuries:

Vaunting hands are now devoid.
Hieroglyphics of her eyes
Blink upon a paradise
Paralyzed and paranoid. (from "The Anniad")

Yet Brooks's verse is equally powerful when plainspoken, as in "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till" and "The Ballad of Rudolph Reed," two of the effective poems about American racism ever written.

Maestro of every conceivable meter, from the ballad to the sonnet and beyond, Gwendolyn Brooks deserves better than to be labeled "the finest black poet of [her] generation," as Robert F. Kiernan's front-cover blurb labels her: Brooks is one of the finest poets of her generation, even of her century, period.