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A review by hilaritas
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks by Gwendolyn Brooks
4.0
Brooks is a beautiful poet and this volume gives small samples of most of her corpus. The striking thing when seeing pieces spanning her entire career is just how versatile she is. Brooks works in lots of forms, on a range of subjects, and all of it is consistently high-quality. Of course her more famous poem "We Real Cool" is included here, but there are plenty of other gems too. I was particularly partial to The Anniad and some of the mid-period poems on Black Power figures.
Brooks' special talent is the ability to wed metaphysical hope to gritty particularity: in her hands, even a mock-heroic account of a hustler's closet speaks about the dignity of humans. In "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till," a handful of lines about drinking black coffee in a red room twist into a devastating portrait of a mother's loss. She approaches her subjects with warmth, humor, and an appreciation for their particularity. There's a density of reference that Eliot would envy, but in the service of real people and real concerns. She is very much a poet for our time (read "Riot"); you ought to read this. You'll learn more about race relations and the Black experience than from a dozen of the haranguing essays pumped out in volume during the current moment.
Brooks' special talent is the ability to wed metaphysical hope to gritty particularity: in her hands, even a mock-heroic account of a hustler's closet speaks about the dignity of humans. In "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till," a handful of lines about drinking black coffee in a red room twist into a devastating portrait of a mother's loss. She approaches her subjects with warmth, humor, and an appreciation for their particularity. There's a density of reference that Eliot would envy, but in the service of real people and real concerns. She is very much a poet for our time (read "Riot"); you ought to read this. You'll learn more about race relations and the Black experience than from a dozen of the haranguing essays pumped out in volume during the current moment.