Amazon.com Review
In this marvelous collection, the words in Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove's "Primer" find wings in Jacob Lawrence's stylized painting, "The Library." Elizabeth Catlett's stunning print, "The Sharecropper," brings even more depth to Langston Hughes's softly sad poem, "Aunt Sue's Stories," and it's almost as if Emilio Cruz's swirling, colorful painting, "Figurative Composition #1," was created for Maya Angelou's poem, "Human Family": "I note the obvious differences / between each sort and type, / but we are more alike, my friends, / than we are unalike."
Editor Belinda Rochelle imaginatively pairs 20 poems by African American poets with 20 works of art by African American artists. Each poem and piece of art evokes the history, identity, and pride of African American people, whether it addresses slavery, family, childhood joy and woes, or racism. In Alice Walker's poem "How Poems Are Made: A Discredited View," she writes: "I know how poems are made. / There is a place the loss must go / There is a place the gain must go. / The leftover love." Readers will pore over this extraordinary compilation for hours, weeks, and years, as it becomes a permanent treasure in their collections. Artists and poets also include William H. Johnson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Nikki Giovanni. --Emilie Coulter
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
HIn this stunning collection, Rochelle's (Witness to Freedom: Young People Who Fought for Civil Rights) 20 pairings of painting and poems, culled from 19th- and 20th-century African-American artists and poets, are nearly as inspired as the works themselves. In one spread, Langston Hughes's "Aunt Sue's Stories" tells of a child listening to Aunt Sue's own experiences of "Black slaves/ Working in the hot sun,/ And black slaves/ Walking in the dewy night." Opposite, Elizabeth Catlett's print Sharecropper portrays a gracefully aging woman, her face a haunting mixture of wisdom and warmth. Alice Walker's "Women," a poem about the path women forged to freedom "With fists as well as/ Hands/ How they battered down/ Doors" and "knew what we/ Must know/ Without knowing a page/ Of it/ Themselves," is juxtaposed with William H. Johnson's Harriet Tubman wearing an American flag, its stars fallen on the ground (it is also the volume's cover image). These pairings examine not only sweeping history but also intimate domestic moments, such as Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," a child's reflection on the father he (or she) never thanked for rising in the "blueblack cold" to make a fire before waking the child ("What did I know, what I did know/ of love's austere and lonely offices?"). Opposite, Henry Ossawa Tanner's Thankful Poor, a glorious oil painting of father and child, depicts their two heads bowed in prayer at the table, bathed in golden light.Regardless of topic, the works focus consistently on the virtues of strength, courage and determination. Elegant and thoughtful design elements shape the volume into a unified whole despite the varied styles of the paintings and poems included, and Rochelle's superb selections and endnotes on the authors and artists make this a collection to be treasured. All ages.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
