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cokechukwu's review
5.0
I’m in love with the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. I’m happy to have found her words, finally, but sad to have gone so long without them. This volume is slim, but the poems are rich thematically and the language is complex, even in the deceptively simple sing-song verses.
noranovels's review
Made me feel, made me think, yet was so hard to find. A beautiful poetry collection!
ms_castalian's review against another edition
5.0
I opened this musical book with an innocent question: why was Gwendolyn Brooks never celebrated among my poetry-loving friends? It could have been the company I kept, but when I was studying in undergrad, it felt that my friends had run the gauntlet of artistic obsessions, and never quite landed upon Brooks. Now, upon reading her, I see how her work denies the young contemporary poet twofold: first, she denies them the feeling of being “in the know” – her work does not open to understanding without conjecture, without risk (how else does one make sense of a line: “Do not be afraid of no, / Who has so far so very far to go” (12)?). Second, she denies young aspiring poets their seeming to others to be in the know, writing as she does in a rhyming, twisting, formal idiom that at times resembles the nursery rhyme. But Brooks is not easy by any means; she defies the nursery rhyme with a mind like a whittling knife.
The moment one opens Annie Allen, one knows that they are in the presence of a genius of lyric. Brooks is quick in two senses of the word – quick-witted, of course, but also quick to move to meaning; her poems leap from word to word and sometimes develop so quickly that they threaten to leave the reader behind: “First fight. Then fiddle” becomes the opening thesis statement of a poem that later spools out that meaning: “Rise… for having first to civilize a space / Wherein to play your violin with grace” (38). To read Brooks is to always be on the edge of one’s seat, so to speak, as she develops her poems the way Annie Allen’s son develops himself: “His lesions are legion. / But reaching is his rule” (40). And Brooks displays her reach through her verbal resourcefulness, always choosing the far-flung object or adjective to add to her clamorous mix: “the milk-glass fruit bowl, iron pot… yellow apron and spilling pretty cherries” (3). These literary objects form the imaginative collection related to “the birth in a narrow room,” her opening poem.
But as the imagined Annie develops throughout the book in three distinct sections (“Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” “The Anniad” and “The Womanhood”), the poems slough off their object-loving characters and become exercises in personal thought, in the lyric “I”: “Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road… Grant me that I am human, that I hurt, / That I can cry” (59). We watch Annie move from being implied by a collection of objects (as in “the birth in a narrow room”) to developing and defending her own selfhood (“Men of careful turns”).
What is laudatory in Brooks is endless, but I’ll relay here one small nut of encouragement that I found in her work: her use of homegrown forms. The compact poem, “the rites for Cousin Vit,” for example, exhibits a lovely concord between form and content, as the poem follows the funeral rites for a relative whose vivaciousness seems to threaten death’s finality: “Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise, / She rises in the sunshine” (45). But the rhyme scheme mimics the casket as a container, perhaps even stretching at its seams: ABBA ABBA ABCCAB. The stretch, the reach, seems Brooks’s native tongue, and we – as in this line rounding off the poem about Cousin Vit – often reap the rewards: “In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge / Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is” (45).
The moment one opens Annie Allen, one knows that they are in the presence of a genius of lyric. Brooks is quick in two senses of the word – quick-witted, of course, but also quick to move to meaning; her poems leap from word to word and sometimes develop so quickly that they threaten to leave the reader behind: “First fight. Then fiddle” becomes the opening thesis statement of a poem that later spools out that meaning: “Rise… for having first to civilize a space / Wherein to play your violin with grace” (38). To read Brooks is to always be on the edge of one’s seat, so to speak, as she develops her poems the way Annie Allen’s son develops himself: “His lesions are legion. / But reaching is his rule” (40). And Brooks displays her reach through her verbal resourcefulness, always choosing the far-flung object or adjective to add to her clamorous mix: “the milk-glass fruit bowl, iron pot… yellow apron and spilling pretty cherries” (3). These literary objects form the imaginative collection related to “the birth in a narrow room,” her opening poem.
But as the imagined Annie develops throughout the book in three distinct sections (“Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” “The Anniad” and “The Womanhood”), the poems slough off their object-loving characters and become exercises in personal thought, in the lyric “I”: “Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road… Grant me that I am human, that I hurt, / That I can cry” (59). We watch Annie move from being implied by a collection of objects (as in “the birth in a narrow room”) to developing and defending her own selfhood (“Men of careful turns”).
What is laudatory in Brooks is endless, but I’ll relay here one small nut of encouragement that I found in her work: her use of homegrown forms. The compact poem, “the rites for Cousin Vit,” for example, exhibits a lovely concord between form and content, as the poem follows the funeral rites for a relative whose vivaciousness seems to threaten death’s finality: “Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise, / She rises in the sunshine” (45). But the rhyme scheme mimics the casket as a container, perhaps even stretching at its seams: ABBA ABBA ABCCAB. The stretch, the reach, seems Brooks’s native tongue, and we – as in this line rounding off the poem about Cousin Vit – often reap the rewards: “In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge / Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is” (45).
fairymodmother's review against another edition
4.0
This is an award-winning and history-making book of poetry from 1945. It was well outside of my comfort zone, but I still found tons to enjoy.
There were a few poems that completely captured an emotion or a moment which I really loved such as "do not be afraid of no" and "pygmies are pygmies still though percht on Alps."
There were two that also captured the idea of privilege and the request for consideration of an issue without devaluing other issues a la the Black Lives Matter or #metoo movements that resounded with me deeply. It's at once so comforting and enraging to know that none of these issues are new, it's just that my skinfolk are so good at repressing narratives that make them worried that if we share power, we'll be treated like we've treated others for hundreds of years.
Thought-provoking, beautifully worded and evocative. I'm not sure poetry will become a mainstay of my literary diet, but this was a great treat.
There were a few poems that completely captured an emotion or a moment which I really loved such as "do not be afraid of no" and "pygmies are pygmies still though percht on Alps."
There were two that also captured the idea of privilege and the request for consideration of an issue without devaluing other issues a la the Black Lives Matter or #metoo movements that resounded with me deeply. It's at once so comforting and enraging to know that none of these issues are new, it's just that my skinfolk are so good at repressing narratives that make them worried that if we share power, we'll be treated like we've treated others for hundreds of years.
Thought-provoking, beautifully worded and evocative. I'm not sure poetry will become a mainstay of my literary diet, but this was a great treat.
readbyrodkelly's review
4.0
Okay. I read GB in high school and a bit in undergrad as well, and I didn’t quite latch onto it. There was something a bit pedestrian about the format. At the time, I was into contemporary poets who wrote very freely, without rules and with very abstract themes. Upon returning to GB and her Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Annie Allen, I really was able to dig in and understand her genius. She takes the simple, the everyday life of this black woman, and really magnifies the various layers of complexity underneath her simplistic exterior. There’s some deep stuff here that takes a minute to sink in: the poems start off deceptively simple and then become quite lyrical and dense.
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