Jeffrey Lamar Coleman

This is a teaching collection, not a poet's collection, and so it contains poetry that varies widely in level of craft. While there is some beautiful work by some of the great poets of the 20th century (Aime Cesaire, Nicholas Guillen, Gwendolyn Brooks, for example) the real impact of these works is collective. And the overpowering feeling you are left by the end with is not one of victory or advance or inspiration, those cliche ways in which we tend to remember the civil rights movement. The poets, as poets should, generate a deeper response: that of rivers of blood unredeemed by what this country has since become. Most of the occasions for the poetry in this collection were murders, and those were just the highest profile murders. The sheer weight of brutal death, and of deadly power, overwhelms any sense of triumph. That is because the real struggle was an attempt to redeem and transform this society at an almost mystical level, and that has not happened. Robert Lowell's great ending line in "For the Union Dead" still encapsulates us: "A savage servility/ slides by on grease."… (mehr)