Use Trouble (Illinois Poetry Series) - Softcover

Harper, Michael S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252075986 ISBN 13: 9780252075988

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2009

Synopsis

For decades, Michael S. Harper has written poetry that speaks with many voices. His work teems with poetry configured as awe, poetry as courtship, and poetry as elegy and homage. Infused with tales and riddles, sass and satire and surprise, Harper’s poetry takes the form of psalms, jazz experiments, soft serenades, and radical provocations.

In Use Trouble, his first major collection since Songlines in Michaeltree, Harper renews poetry as the art of taking nothing for granted. In three groups--"The Fret Cycle," "Use Trouble," and "I Do Believe in People"--he draws on his seemingly inexhaustible resources to paint, sing, sympathize, and sorrow. Here are his tributes to his father and family, his irrepressible playfulness, and his lifelong romance between poetry and music.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael S. Harper, University Professor and professor of English at Brown University, is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Songlines in Michaeltree; Dear John, Dear Coltrane;Honorable Amendments;Images ofKin; and History Is Your Own Heartbeat. He is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Rhode Island and has been honored with the Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America, the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Black Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the Robert Hayden Poetry Award, among others.

From Booklist:

Harper—the author of 16 books, recipient of numerous awards, and coeditor of the essential The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (2000)—improvises on form, tinkering with the heroic couplet, slanting lines like a musical score or drawings of saxophones, and mixing conversation with formalism to create an intimate lyricism. This virtuosic, symphonic, embracive collection is a memoir, a reader’s notebook, a professor’s lesson plan, a family scrapbook, and a poet’s book of gratitude. Harper pays deep tribute to Jacob Lawrence, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, and Nobel laureates Toni Morrison, Joseph Brodsky, and Rabindranath Tagore. In the resounding long poem “Archives: The Public Library,” Harper praises libraries for the “amplitude of the oasis,” and assures young people that “you can choose / your ancestors: this is the legacy of the library.” Among his chosen are Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Henry James, who offer clues to “our psychic condition.” Whether he is telling nuanced tales of friends or family, or celebrating the awakening power of art, Harper perceives life’s interconnectivity and the perpetual cycle of sorrow and joy. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0252075986
• ISBN 13: 9780252075988
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368