Honorable Amendments: POEMS - Softcover

Harper, Michael S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 025206514X ISBN 13: 9780252065149

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1995

Synopsis

Michael Harper writes out of the fire of the African American experience. The people and places of his life become something that is uniquely his own--yet he transforms them into something irreplaceable and powerful and perfect for the reader as well.

About this title

Reviews

Harper, long a professor of English at Brown University, never subordinates poetry to erudition in this his ninth collection (following the first in 10 years), as he continues to work from varied perspectives within African American history and experience. He steadfastly avoids cliched enshrinement of heroes even as his belief that history must resonate personally within its witnesses leads to poems addressing figures found in public and private documents. Harper writes about (and to) the well known (Martin Luther King, John Coltrane); such lesser lights as Romare Bearden, Harriet Waltzer Sheridan; family members, mentors; jazz greats and baseball players to charge the webs of kinship he uncovers. Anyone who has shaped African American discourse affords Harper his voice: "The territory is within us: sustain, maintain, renew." Such moments of lyric intensity meld with Harper's direct, authoritative diction. These "honorable amendments" to our nation's self-reflections are also necessary ones.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 025206514X
• ISBN 13: 9780252065149
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160