Selected Poems [Paperback]

Gwendolyn Brooks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1963

This new volume by a distinguished modern poet, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, brings together the best of her work from three earlier books now out of print (A Street in Bronzevile, Annie Allen, The Bean Eaters) and includes a section of new poems which have not appeared before in book form. Selected Poems reaffirms impressively Miss Brook's rich and varied giftsher technical mastery, her compassionate, illuminating response to a world that is both special and universal, her warm humanity.

In "A Critical Reassessment," which appeared in The Nation in 1962, Harvey Curtis Webster, of the University of Louisville, wrote in part:

"Gwendolyn Brooks has never denied her engagement in the contemporary situation or been over-obsessed by it. In her engagement she resembles Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Margaret Walker. IN her ability to see through the temporal she equals Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, writers of fiction who accept Negro-ness as prizeable differentiation and a dilemma, include it to transcend it...Like all good writers she acknowledges Now by verifying it accepts herself and the distinguishing background that is part of her distinction. But she refuses to let Negro-ness limit her humanity...

"She is a very good poet, the only superlative I dare use in our time of misusage; compares not to other Negro poets or other women poets but to the best modern poets, she ranks huigh."

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Miss Brooks has a very fine talent...a faculty which is becoming rare in contemporary poetry: an interest not merely in her own responses, but in other people as well." -- Paul Engle

About the Author

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917. Her books include A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, The Bean Eaters, Maud Martha, and In the Mecca.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins; First Edition edition (June 1963)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060909897
• ISBN-13: 978-0060909895
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,109,783 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gwendolyn Brooks is Magnificient, October 6, 2000

By 

author Paula Sharp (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Selected Poems (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)

Five stars! If I had to choose the ten greatest books of the twentieth century, Brooks' Selected Poems would have to be one of them. Her voice is entirely original - no one who came before Brooks or follows her writes quite like her. Brooks' work is distinguished by so many wonderful qualities - she may have the best ear of any living American poet. Her sense of the musicality of language rivals that of Yeats and Dylan Thomas (as in, say, "A Sunset of the City," "We Real Cool," "Big Bessie throws her son into the street, and her great long poem, "Riot."). I once heard Gwendolyn Brooks read over twenty years ago when I was in college, and I still haven't forgotten the sound of her voice, and with it the dawn of my understanding that poetry is half-music, half-language. Brooks is also capable of that kind of clarity and brilliance of imagery that you find in the best William Carlos Williams Poems. (Read, for example, "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till" or "My Little `Bout Town Gal"). What has always been most special about her work for me, however, is the way Brooks captures nuances of feeling, multi-layers of emotion, in a few phrases, as in her very contemporary poem about abortion, "the mother," or her love poem, "A Lovely Love." The only other poet I know of who does this so well is Emily Dickinson.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, January 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Selected Poems (Paperback)

This is a wonderful collection of poems, Brooks's best. I understand why Langston Hughes has received so much attention over the last several decades--his first-person commentary and description of Black life in the twentieth century is valuable and enlightening--but Brooks, at her best (i.e., in this book), is a better poet than Hughes was at his best, and I'm a little miffed that she hasn't received more credit by the general public than she has. It is just that this volume won the Pulizter Prize, and it will certainly be around for some time.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A small collection of a larger-than-life career, April 20, 2000

By 

Ken Mitchell "sabbath999" (Edina, MO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Selected Poems (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)

In 1984, I had the honor to spend a day with Miss Brooks, and to hear her do a reading of many of the poems in this book. I wish that all of you could have heard that reading, her work is meant to be read aloud. That's what I would advise you to do, buy this book, and when you get it, read the poems aloud. Play with the flow and the cadence of the words. Miss Brooks is a national treasure, and her words speak to us all.