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Loading... Selected Poemsby Gwendolyn Brooks
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I didn't particularly enjoy this collection. I've been teaching "We Real Cool" for years, and I never get tired of it, so I looked forward to a larger sampling of Brooks' work, but I don't really think there is anything here I'll come back to. Undeniably, Brooks knows words and sound, but this honestly came down to feeling like a poet's playtime to me. It seemed heavy on experimentation with sound and very quick scenes, and light on meaning. For someone who is just starting to play with the sound of poetry and explore it's uses, away from the traditional and expected rhymes and rhythms, I could recommend this, but for me---well, I was often bored, and rarely satisfied or drawn into the poems themselves. (  ) whitewavedarling | May 12, 2008 |  Brooks' poems are deep, complicated, sometimes hard to understand, but heart-warming, funny and moving. Everyone will like SOMETHING about this collection. (  ) Crystalee | Apr 23, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
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In "A Critical Reassessment," which appeared in The Nation in 1962, Harvey Curtis Webster, of the University of Louisville, wrote in part:
"Gwendolyn Brooks has never denied her engagement in the contemporary situation or been over-obsessed by it. In her engagement she resembles Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Margaret Walker. IN her ability to see through the temporal she equals Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, writers of fiction who accept Negro-ness as prizeable differentiation and a dilemma, include it to transcend it...Like all good writers she acknowledges Now by verifying it accepts herself and the distinguishing background that is part of her distinction. But she refuses to let Negro-ness limit her humanity...
"She is a very good poet, the only superlative I dare use in our time of misusage; compares not to other Negro poets or other women poets but to the best modern poets, she ranks huigh."
(retrieved from Amazon Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:59:43 -0500)
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