cover image Honorable Amendments: Poems

Honorable Amendments: Poems

Michael S. Harper. University of Illinois Press, $20.95 (160pp) ISBN 978-0-252-02143-5

Harper, long a professor of English at Brown University, never subordinates poetry to erudition in this his ninth collection (following the first in 10 years), as he continues to work from varied perspectives within African American history and experience. He steadfastly avoids cliched enshrinement of heroes even as his belief that history must resonate personally within its witnesses leads to poems addressing figures found in public and private documents. Harper writes about (and to) the well known (Martin Luther King, John Coltrane); such lesser lights as Romare Bearden, Harriet Waltzer Sheridan; family members, mentors; jazz greats and baseball players to charge the webs of kinship he uncovers. Anyone who has shaped African American discourse affords Harper his voice: ``The territory is within us: sustain, maintain, renew.'' Such moments of lyric intensity meld with Harper's direct, authoritative diction. These ``honorable amendments'' to our nation's self-reflections are also necessary ones. (Dec.)