Customer Reviews

Catch the Fire!!!: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poetry

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I am a 19 year old aspiring writer, and I heard Derrick Gilbert speak at my school, the man not only has a phenomenal voice, but a flare to make all the words seem like they are directed towards you. I read "Catch the Fire" and the book gave me a whole new outlook on poetry as I knew it, and now i can't put my pen down. This book reflects on many everyday issues and would make excellant discussion topics!!! I think that the book should be sold on more bookshelves for better visibility and I think that everyone who likes poetry should read this, it changed me, it could do the same for you!

"Catch the Fire", by Derrick I.M. Gilbert opened doors to a whole new world that I knew everything about. This book deals with alot of real life issues and emotions that I already had, but never seen them expressed in written poetry other than the expressions presented by the seventh and possibly final genre of African American music(rap). After reading this book I fell in love with the power poetry can provide to the human spirit.

i re-visited today a poem of mine Derrick I. M. Gilbert published in 1998 in the "Catch The Fire!" anthology: "Fat Grass & Slow Rain" dedicated to my father and mother, Walter and Willene Murphy.

My father left here 20 years or so before Professor Gilbert published "Fat Grass & Slow Rain." Mommy outlived daddy 27 years and survived me reading my own and my friends' published poems at her convalescent home bedside almost every day for six years until she, too, passed away in 2001 at the age of 83. If i apologized for holding her captive in poetry camp and asked if she wanted more, she'd always say, "Yeah! Poetry is good!"

i wonder if the beautiful even at 83 woman i am honored to call mother ever forgave any of her children, especially me, for taunting her, ever-beautiful in body, mind and spirit, to take another lover after daddy left. All my coaxing failed which leads me now to believe more fervently than ever in true love and that silly song's line: once you have found it, never let it go.

In my poem "Fat Grass & Slow Rain" daddy is ma's Slow Rain and ma is daddy's Fat Grass. The poem begins with her pregnancy with me, the first child of a union formerly stressed by divorce, separation and my partly or wholly estranged older brothers and sister.

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i am grateful Professor Gilbert published "Catch The Fire!" and gave me the opportunity to share with my mother my own poem and those of Amiri Baraka, Kenneth Carroll, Kamau Daaood, Derrick I.M. Gilbert, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Shaquille O'Neal, Abiodun Oyewole, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, Roni Walter and Michael War.

i concur: "Yeah! Poetry is good!"
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