Hoagland's poetry recollects what is forgotten and discovers what is lost: family "legacies," humans sacrificed for oppression or slavery, peoples "thrown overboard." This new volume selects from 30 years of work while also presenting new poems. With bebop rhythms and a visceral idiom, chantlike "drum music" informs "the grave of time," the ocean pilgrimage from the ancestral soil of Africa to "the funky hold of america." Poems reminiscent of Etheridge Knight's "The Idea of Ancestry" pay tribute to his great-grandfather and "seaborne ancestors" from "the old gold coast." The title poem, a monolog in his great-grandmother's voice, evokes Sojourner Truth, while other poems describe Beat poet Bob Kaufman, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, and Jefferson's slave mistress, Sally Hemings. Outrage arises from roots of family and land and from a sense of shared suffering. Hoagland (The City and Other Poems) is a contributing editor to the America Poetry Review. His new and selected is recommended for all poetry collections. Frank Allen, Northampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA
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Product Description
Everett Hoagland is a poet of witness. Esteemed by the African-American community for blending language with musical form through sound, image, and rhythm, his poetry is a passionate examination of history, which allows us to neither look away nor forget.
every Fourth of JulyI want some country, some-one to send a replica of one of allthose slave ships over the Middle Passage to the tall ship parade-To keep it honest, to make it real, to seeFirst published by the historic Broadside Press, Hoagland now offers us thirty years of his best published poems plus a collection of stunning new work.
The temperature of these poems is high, sometimes radiantly warm and loving, sometimes scalding with a sense of justice and injustice. But Hoagland's range is wide. He digs for the poetry in his subjects, never resting in rhetoric but passing through it into something finer and deeper. He writes about Africa; about friendship and fatherhood; about New England, his adopted home; about historical figures who live in his mind and his blood. From Sally Hemings to Winnie Mandela to Amiri Baraka; from his daughter's birth to the outrage of clitoridectomy, Hoagland's heart, his intelligence and his power of language interact in this honest and sometimes lacerating collection.
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Everett Hoagland has won the Gwendolyn Brooks Award and two Massachusetts Poetry Fellowships. Beacon Press will be publishing his new anthology on African-American writing. His poems have appeared in APR, Iowa Review, Essence and The Progressive. Originally from Philadelphia, he reads widely around the country, teaches at the University of Massachusetts (Dartmouth), is a contributing editor to APR, and the former Poet Laureate of New Bedford, where he makes his home.
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