Here: New and Selected Poems - Softcover

Hoagland, Everett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0967952050 ISBN 13: 9780967952055

Publisher: Leapfrog Pr, 2002

Synopsis

Three decades of poetry by one of the nation's most respected African-American poets covers a wide range of topics, including injustice, Africa, and clitoridectomy, among other important topics. Original.

About this title

About the Author

Everett Hoagland is the winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Award as well as two Massachusetts Council Fellowships for Poetry. His poems have appeared in venues as diverse as The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Essence and The Progressive. He is a professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts (Dartmouth) and travels widely to perform his work.

From the Back Cover

"Everett Hoagland is a poet whose sensibility has been seasoned in the rich loam of the black folk heritage and impressively informed by the full range of the Western literary canon," says the eminent African American poet Sam Allen. "This is an important volume. This is a poetry of eloquence and challenge, rooted in the wisdom of his ancestral past and articulated with a confident mastery of his craft."

HERE is Everett Hoagland's finest achievement, offering us thirty years of his best published poems plus a collection of stunning new work. The temperature of these poems is high, sometimes radiantly warm and loving, sometimes scalding with a sense of justice and injustice. Hoagland's heart, his intelligence and his power of language interact in this honest and sometimes lacerating collection.

"The people crowding these poems might spring from a vast mural of African and African-American history. We see Sally Hemings, the slave mistress of Thomas Jefferson; the last of the Scottsboro "Boys;" Joann Little, a prison inmate who killed the white guard attempting to rape her; the Beat poet Bob Kaufman; jazz trumpeter Miles Davis; Winnie Mandela ...the famous and the infamous ... The poet's own family ghosts stare at us from the vast mural too. Everett Hoagland speaks and sings for them all. Angry, celebratory, incantatory, there is a presence in these poems that will not be denied." (from the Foreword by Martín Espada)

"The passion of Everett Hoagland's social and historical consciousness match the skill of his lyrical command and the brilliance of his imagination. That so much of his work is now reachable in one place is a blessing." (Clarence Major)

Reviews

Hoagland's poetry recollects what is forgotten and discovers what is lost: family "legacies," humans sacrificed for oppression or slavery, peoples "thrown overboard." This new volume selects from 30 years of work while also presenting new poems. With bebop rhythms and a visceral idiom, chantlike "drum music" informs "the grave of time," the ocean pilgrimage from the ancestral soil of Africa to "the funky hold of america." Poems reminiscent of Etheridge Knight's "The Idea of Ancestry" pay tribute to his great-grandfather and "seaborne ancestors" from "the old gold coast." The title poem, a monolog in his great-grandmother's voice, evokes Sojourner Truth, while other poems describe Beat poet Bob Kaufman, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, and Jefferson's slave mistress, Sally Hemings. Outrage arises from roots of family and land and from a sense of shared suffering. Hoagland (The City and Other Poems) is a contributing editor to the America Poetry Review. His new and selected is recommended for all poetry collections. Frank Allen, Northampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Leapfrog Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0967952050
• ISBN 13: 9780967952055
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 122