Brooks, Gwendolyn (Vol. 4) - Brooks, Gwendolyn 1917–
Brooks, Gwendolyn 1917–
Ms Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Black American poet. She has been called one of America's most "objective" poets and her imaginative and powerful poems have reminded some critics of the work of Wallace Stevens. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4, rev. ed.)
In [In the Mecca], Gwendolyn Brooks is more self-consciously a Negro than ever before. The long title poem is both an impressionistic and naturalistic journey through a huge ghetto apartment house, through the black precincts of despair. It is a strong poem, displaying the same raw power and roughness that marked and marred Richard Wright's fiction. Miss Brooks preaches a sermon of life in the face of her despair; she invokes the examples of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X to counter the chaos of poor life in the Mecca. It is a new manner and a new voice for Miss Brooks, better than her earlier work in its honesty, poorer in its loss of music and...
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