Maya Angelou is a gifted and phenomenal writer. This collection of poems speak with so much heart and wisdom. She writes these poems with anger, celebration, rage, honesty, and hope in an artistically powerful voice. I admire how she effortlessly uses metaphor and rhyme that doesn't feel forced. This is my very first Maya Angelou's work that I've read, and I'd highly recommend this book to everyone. Whether you're a fan of poems collection or not, you're still going to be in love with this one. ( )

Angelou is a first-rate autobiographer, and a mediocre poet, though a fine aloudreader and stage presence in an era when even Obama's first inaugural poet had no idea how to aloudread her own poem. Angelou fulfills the limited popular American (Romantic) idea of a poet--one who talks, ad infinitum, about oneself and one's problems (or in Angelou's case, problems over which she triumphs*). We are still stuck in the Romantic period, two centuries after Wordsworth and Coleridge (then Keats and Shelley and Byron) first started writing poems about themselves.
Chaucer didn't. Shakespeare didn't in his plays, and in the sonnets, he gives a stage version of "self." Moliere didn't. Dryden didn't. Austen didn't. Dickens didn't really, even in Copperfield (a very dif feel from what his childhood must have felt like). The list goes on.
Arguably, poets have the least interesting of lives, if they have the time and place to write. Not as interesting as a plumber's life, even--though I have known one good plumber-poet. The most interesting lives--say, a teenager in Mali, a refugee in Syria, a Parisian Jew at the start of WWII--are often too overwhelming to write well about, in the midst. Hemingway determined that all 20C writers would have to try to live "exciting" lives, in order to write about them. Poets don't bother. They find themselves endlessly interesting, though nobody else does.
In Angelou's case, she combines sentimentality (Give me a cool drink of water 'fore I die...) with a triumphant tone of overcoming which always signals Public Relations. Then she adds a supcon of platitudes, like "one thing I cry for / ..believe in enough to die for...everyman's responsibility to man."
If Bill Clinton had valued poetry more and politics less, Gwendolyn Brooks would have been his Inaugural poet. JFK had the respect for poetry--and the political genius--to select a political enemy, longtime Republican, to grace his Inaugural, Frost. ( )

I read this book because I enjoy reading poetry. Maya Angelou is a true poet. Poetry has the ability to convey any emotion that you are feeling from happy to sad to in between. Children of all ages should be introduced to poetry but this book is probably for sixth graders. ( )

I had to read this for school, so I was not originally very excited. Haha. But, as I started to read, I was captured by the imagery and informal language that Maya Angelou puts into her writing. Being a writer myself, I appreciated it more than some of my peers. I read some of the poems aloud to myself and the flow is really good, definitely a good book for contemporary poetry lovers. While non-poetry lovers might not be able to appreciate it as much, the good images help to make some of the poems more like a story. ( )

I'm not a big fan of poetry and although some of these poems were good, I wasn't blown away by any of them. I did like one called "Remembrance" just because it was a little naughty but otherwise the poems were ok. ( )