Customer Reviews

I Am a Black Woman

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I am reviewing this book of poetry from a volume stolen from my junior high library back in the mid seventies. I would check the book out at the beginning of the year and renew it until the day school ended. One end-of the-school-year day when I could not imagine parting with it for the summer, I decided to keep it; pay the lost book fee. That summer I felt free to fill every space on the page with my own writing. The blank spaces were filled with what came out after the poetry of Mari Evans went in and mixed with who I was. This book was probably washed away in a flood because I left it in the carriage house on James Island, SC in 1978 when I headed out into a broader world; hitch hiked north and then west and then south with a wild wind that I am still with today. But I took the book with me in my heart, words and ways of dealing with the world. I had read them aloud so many times that they had grown into me.
I recall these poems being deep and melancholy. I have always been, by nature, one that looks for the joy and it always seems to find me. But I think I needed the shadows in these poems to make me a more rounded person.And then there was the power that it breathed into me, that merged with the power from my mother and all of the mothers before her. I was not wronged or held back and had not suffered tribulations. But in those days, my emo teenage times, I wanted to feel more. I found that "more" in this little book of poetry: a thin, black cloth bound volume that made me weep and rejoice. Today is one of those days that calls me back to my roots. I haven't read the full volume since I was a child but today I will order a copy.

This is a great poem dealing with the trials of a strong black women