Selected poems

Author

Gwendolyn Brooks

Call Number

• 811 B87.3 2006 (CEN, OSH)

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Edition

First Harper Perennial modern classics edition.

Publication Information

[New York] : HarperPerennial, 2006.

Physical Description

xii, 127 pages, 34 pages ; 22 cm

Summary

Selected Poems is the classic volume by the distinguished and celebrated poet Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This compelling collection showcases Brooks's technical mastery, her warm humanity, and her compassionate and illuminating response to a complex world. This edition also includes a special PS section with insights, interviews, and more--including a short piece by Nikki Giovanni entitled "Remembering Gwen." By 1963 the civil rights movement was in full swing across the United States, and more and more African American writers were increasingly outspoken in attacking American racism and insisting on full political, economic, and social equality for all. In that memorable year of the March on Washington, Harper & Row released Brooks’s Selected Poems, which incorporated poems from her first three collections, as well as a selection of new poems. This edition of Selected Poems includes A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks's first published volume of poetry for which she became nationally known and which led to successive Guggenheim fellowships; Annie Allen, published one year before she became the first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize in any category; and The Bean Eaters, her fifth publication which expanded her focus from studies of the lives of mainly poor urban black Americans to the heroism of early civil rights workers and events of particular outrage--including the 1955 Emmett Till lynching and the 1957 school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Contents

• A Street in Bronzeville. Kitchenette building
• The mother
• Southeast corner
• Hunchback girl : She thinks of Heaven
• A song in the front yard
• The ballad of chocolate Mabbie
• The preacher : Ruminates behind the sermon
• Sadie and Maud
• The independent man
• Of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery
• The vacant lot
• The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith
• Negro hero
• Gay Chaps at the Bar
• Still I do keep my look, my identity
• My dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
• Looking
• Piano after war
• Mentors
• The white troops had their orders but the negroes looked like men
• Firstly inclined to take what it is told
• "God works in a mysterious way"
• Love note I : Surely
• Love note II : Flags
• The progress
• Annie Allen. Notes From the Childhood and the Girlhood. Clogged and soft and sloppy eyes
• Chicken, she chided early, should not wait
• After the baths and bowel-work, he was dead
• Late Annie in her bower lay
• The duck fats rot in the roasting pan
• "Do not be afraid on no"
• But can see better there, and laughing here
• The Anniad. Think of sweet and chocolate
• Appendix to the Anniad. You need the untranslatable ice to watch
• The certainty we two shall meet by God
• Oh mother, mother, where is happiness
• The Womanhood. People who have no children can be hard
• What shall I give my children? Who are poor
• And shall I prime my children, pray, to pray?
• First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string
• When my dears die, the festival-colored brightness
• Life for my child is simple, and is good
• Sweet Sally took a cardboard box
• A light and diplomatic bird
• Carried her unprotesting out the door
• They get to Benvenuti's. There are booths
• The dry brown coughing beneath their feet
• And if sun comes
• One wants a teller in a time like this
• People protest in sprawling lightless ways
• Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road
• The Bean Eaters. In honor of David Anderson Brooks, my father
• My little 'bout-town gal
• Strong men, riding horses
• The bean eaters
• We real cool
• Old Mary
• A Bronzeville mother loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi mother burns bacon
• The last quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till
• Mrs. Small
• Jessie Mitchell's mother
• The Chicago Defender sends a man to Little Rock
• The lovers of the poor
• A sunset of the city
• A man of middle class
• The crazy woman
• Bronzeville man with a belt in the back
• A lovely love
• A penitent considers another coming of Mary
• Bronzeville woman in a red hat
• In Emanuel's nightmare : Another coming of Christ
• The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
• New Poems. Riders to the blood-red wrath
• The empty woman
• To be in love
• Of Robert Frost
• Langston Hughes
• A Catch of Shy Fish. Garbageman : The man with the orderly mind
• Sick man looks at flowers
• Old people working (garden, car)
• Weaponed woman
• Old tennis player
• A surrealist and Omega
• Spaulding and François
• Big Bessie throws her son into the street.