Soul Looks Back in Wonder

A full-color, collaborative effort, featuring work by the artist for Jambo Means Hello and poetry by Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, and Walter Dean Myers, among others, passes the heritage of strength and creativity to today's young African Americans. Winner 1994 Coretta Scott King Book Award. BOMC.

Grade 5 Up-Artist Feelings invited poets whom he admired to compose original, short verses for these drawings, with breathtakingly rich and powerful results. A tribute to African-American creativity, the collection should appeal to the sensibilities and imaginations of many readers, regardless of ethnic background. A never-before published poem by Langston Hughes, written to accompany Feeling's 1962 poster for the Congress of Racial Equality, is included. The 11-line piece asks, "All you who are dreamers too,/Help me to make/Our world anew./I reach out my dreams to you." Maya Angelou, Walter Dean Myers, and Lucille Clifton are among the 12 other contributors. The full-color, three-quarter and double-spread art depicts children and young people from West Africa, South America, and the United States, but a few of the poems do not speak to young children, e.g., Haki R. Madhubuti's "Destiny": "under volcanoes & timeless years within watch/and low tones. around corners, in deep caves among/misunderstood and sometimes meaningless sounds./ cut beggars, outlaw pimps & whores. resurrect work." That poem, as well as Eugene B. Redmond's Boyz n Search of Their Soular System, will prove more meaningful to adult and young adult readers.
Judy Greenfield, Rye Free Reading Room, NY
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For his first full-color picture book, Caldecott Honor artist Feelings ( Jambo Means Hello ) solicits poems from a stellar lineup of contemporary African American authors. The contributors, he writes, "understand that one way to project our positive hopes for the future is for young people to see their own beauty reflected in our eyes, through our work." The selections--by Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, Askia M. Toure and 10 others--are uniformly uplifting, with affirming messages about the heritage, strength and dreams of African Americans. "Who / can be born black / and / not / sing / the wonder of it / the joy / the / challenge," asks Mari Evans. Drawings of figures stand out against dynamic, poster-like designs in collages that emphasize the "flow of African creativity" that the artist wishes to share; a note on the paints, cutouts and colored papers (including marbleized paper and wallpaper). The verse was gathered after the art was completed--in a sense, the poetry illustrates the collages. Of special note is Langston Hughes's previously unpublished "To You," written for a poster Feelings executed in 1962. Hughes invokes dreamers to help him make "our world anew," while Feelings's breathtaking design incorporates a winged figure flying through a vista of violets, golds and olive green. A unique celebration. Ages 7-up. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Continuing the reflection and celebration of African-American experiences begun in Something On My Mind (with Nikki Grimes, 1978) and Daydreamers (with Eloise Greenfield, 1981), Feelings pairs 13 poems (either new or, for the most part, previously inaccessible) by Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, Walter Dean Myers, Margaret Walker, et al., with complex artwork involving blueprinting, stencilling, collage, and spray-painting. In full color for the first time, Feelings's arresting portraits are enhanced by strong horizontal background elements and stylized discs, bars, and dots. The poems convey an urgent need to bolster the hopes of a generation ``growing up in an environment where indifference and hostility are bullets aimed straight at the core of their spirits'' [preface]. Most poignant is Haki Madhubuti's ``Destiny'': ``...take hold/do the necessary, the possible, the correctly simple/...do the expected, do what all people do/reverse destruction. capture tomorrows.'' Some of the poems are accessible to young readers; others are more suited to teenagers. Notes on the poets; no contents page or index. An outstandingly beautiful and powerful book. (Poetry/Picture book. 7+) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gr. 3-6, younger for reading aloud. In powerful pictures, Feelings celebrates "African creativity" with realistic portraits of individual people set against landscapes flowing across space and time. Starting with drawings of people that he sketched while in Ghana, Senegal, Guyana, and the U.S., he has added color and light in a dramatic combination of collage and sweeping background. The pictures are full of character and strength, with women, men, and children dreaming, reading, working. The artist asked several great African American poets to write poems for his pictures, but not all these writers are at their best here. Some of the poems are messagey and abstract, perhaps because it's hard to match picture and words. One of the best pieces, however, "Boyz n Search of Their Soular System," by Eugene B. Redmond, reaches out from the energy and hostility of the streets where "gang-bangs reign" and minds are "too roughly w/rapped." Several pieces show and tell the power of the imagination: Maya Angelou talks of the "tracks" that new ideas make in her mind; a moving author note about Alexis De Veaux says that "learning is a brightly burning passion for her, since she never forgets it was once illegal for Black people to learn to read and write." A final quote by Malcolm X celebrates education. Hazel Rochman