[In the following review, Parson-Nesbitt traces the development of Lorde's poetry as evidenced by the selections in Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New (Revised).]

Audre Lorde wrote, "Poetry is not a luxury." Her writing testifies to the truth of that statement. To live in the second half of the twentieth century, with its daily psychic and physical violence, we need her poems for guidance and sanity. Lorde was Black, lesbian, a mother, the daughter of Grenadian immigrants, and a poet of fierce and expansive talent. With characteristic courage and stubborness, she insisted on claiming all parts of her complex identity as necessary and whole. Her adopted African name, Gamba Adisa: "Warrior—She Who Makes Her Meaning Known," expresses Lorde's commitment to both political struggle and writing, rejecting any separation between the two. She wrote:

Be who you are and will be
learn to cherish
that boisterous Black Angel that drives you
up one day and down another
protecting the place where your power rises
running like hot blood

from the same source
as your pain.

Passionate and incisive, sensual and political, Lorde's writing celebrates women's, and especially lesbian, eroticism. She wrote with unerring poetic timing and condensed, explosive, and stunningly original imagery. Her poetic vision was as complex, global, and everyday as a New York City street.

Undersong is not a "collected works," as Lorde, with characteristic precision, makes clear in the book's subtitle. An updated edition of Chosen Poems, Old and New (1982, now going out of print), Undersong contains work from Lorde's five first, out-of-print, collections. It differs from Chosen Poems because it includes six previously unpublished early poems, and stylistic revisions of much of the work. (The layout and type are also considerably more attractive.) Undersong does not include any poems from Lorde's two most profoundly moving and stylistically mature poetry collections, The Black Unicorn and Our Dead Behind Us. Lorde felt that each of these collections was too much of a unit to excerpt from. In this respect, Undersong does not show the whole span of her brilliant poetic achievement. But it is rich in the immense talent, moral courage, and unflinching vision of one of the great writers of our time.

Undersong traces the development of Lorde's poetry from the early 1950s, when she was a teenager growing up in Harlem, through 1982 (with the exceptions mentioned above). As Undersong demonstrates, Lorde gradually abandoned poetic conceits for more direct truth-telling. Her work became increasingly gutsy as she gained confidence in the power of her ideas and control over the medium of language. The early work is circumspect, suggestive, not overtly political. The poems are fairly traditional in structure and form—some use end rhyme. They often employ sentimental, over-used themes. The imagery is mostly natural, as if all the poetry books Lorde could find in the New York City Public Library contained pastoral poems. However, the early poems anticipate Lorde's later work in certain images and emotional concerns. For example, her 1954 poem "Memorial II" examines differences separating women, using one of Lorde's recurring images, a mirror:

Genevieve
what are you seeing
in my mirror this morning
peering out like a hungry bird
behind my eyes
are you seeking the shape of a girl
I have grown less and less
to resemble …

But the early poems are much less radical both in form and in content. They are not openly lesbian and lack the passion of Lorde's later work.

The poems that have been added are not intensely interesting as poems. In several cases, they seem to fill in a sequence, adding a sense of the progression of Lorde's work in style or content. "Bloodbirth," from 1961, offers us an early hint of the poet to come: "and I am trying to speak / without art or embellishment / with bits of me flying out in all directions."

By the mid- to late 1960s, perhaps propelled by the changing political climate, Lorde is moving more surely into the specificity of style and theme that we know her for. The first poem dealing explicitly with politics—the politics of race—is "Suffer the Children" (1964). One of Lorde's remarkable abilities as a poet is to redeem meaning from, and give words to, events so painful they have left us otherwise speechless and immobilized. Dedicating the poem to "two of four children killed in a racial bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham," Lorde compellingly asks: "But who shall disinter these girls / to love the women they were to become"? In one of the last poems in the section, "Martha," on the agonizing death of a friend (lover?), Lorde's released anger and urgency finally break the scaffolding of conventional form.

One of the traits that make Lorde's poetry so essential is her ability to counter alienation and despair. I think one of many ways she does this is by making herself (and by extension, the reader) active in the powerful forces of history. In "Equinox," the first poem of Part 2, Lorde specifically links important events of her own life to historical events of 1968-1969: "The year my daughter was born / DuBois died in Accra while I / marched into Washington / to the death knell of dreaming / which 250,000 others mistook for a hope." And, in a question Lorde will explore over a decade, "Change of Season" begins: "Am I to be cursed forever with becoming / somebody else on the way to myself?" (Later, in The Black Unicorn, she clarified: "Nobody wants to die on the way / caught between ghosts of whiteness / and the real water").

By the late sixties and early seventies, the poems are filled with the gem-like aphoristic phrases of which Lorde is so brilliantly capable, and her trick of fusing several meanings with skillful line breaks. She writes, "When you are hungry / learn to eat / whatever sustains you / until morning" and "If you do not learn to hate / you will never be lonely / enough to love easily" ("For Each of You").

Lorde also dealt with thorny internal conflicts in the inseparable struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia. She spoke out against racism and class bias in the white feminist community: "But I who am bound by my mirror / as well as my bed / see cause in color / as well as sex" ("Who Said It Was Simple," 1970). She tried to understand the obstacles that separate Black women: "I know beyond fear and history / that our teaching means keeping trust / with less and less correctness / only with ourselves" (#x0022;Dear Toni …," 1971). Daring the labyrinth of internalized hatred, Lorde transformed it to strength: "But I have peeled away your anger / down to its core of love / and look mother / I am a dark temple / where your true spirit rises" ("Black Mother Woman," 1971).

In the progression of Undersong, we can see how Lorde becomes skilled at moving many directions within one poem—from her childhood to her children, from personal events to world events. Where the earlier poems typically sustained one metaphor, here the metaphors are sustained on many levels, making the poems more complex and active. The poems become more elegant for their directness, yet they are never reduced to their messages.

Part III includes work written mostly between 1968 and 1973. These poems are like espresso coffee: black, and richer for their bitter edge. They are also more raucous, with a black/Black humor, knowing and pointed. The poem titled "A Sewerplant Grows in Harlem or I'm a Stranger Here Myself When Does the Next Swan Leave?" sarcastically repeats "and the mind you have reached / is not a working mind / please hang up and die again." Unlike that in The Black Unicorn, the anger expressed here is often not subtly mediated by other forms of love and knowledge: "They think they are praying when they squat / to shit money-pebbles shaped like their parents' brains" ("New York City"). However, we do get the gorgeously erotic "Love Poem": "Speak earth and bless me / with what is richest / make sky flow honey out of my hips." Lorde confronts the depths of racism: "call me / roach and presumptuous / nightmare upon your white pillow" ("The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches"). But Lorde did not have the comfort of giving in to despair; she had too much to lose, especially in her lifelong concern for the psychological and physical survival of Black children. She vowed: "So are signed makers of myth / sworn through our blood / to give legends / the children will come to understand" ("Blackstudies").

As powerful as much of this work is, readers will miss The Black Unicorn (1978) and Our Dead Behind Us (1986). Unicorn liberates us with its fierce, illuminating blaze. Integrating imagery from West African myths, culture, and philosophy, Unicorn is Lorde's most cogent, brilliant, and lucid work. Our Dead contains Lorde's harshest, least forgiving, densest, most difficult poetry. (It took me years to be able to read it.) An overview of Lorde's poetry without Our Dead is like leaving the bass out of the music. Readers who haven't read these books may not realize that the brightest flame and the hottest coals are missing from Undersong.

Because of this, the last section of Undersong may unfortunately feel like its weakest for those who know Lorde's work. Even so, the seven poems representing Lorde's poetry from 1978 to 1982 are amazing. "Need: A Chorale for Black Women's Voices" is dedicated to two named Black women and "the hundreds of other mangled Black Women whose nightmares inform these words." In it a chorus of Black women suffering physical violence, especially as perpetuated by Black men, chants: "We were not meant to bleed / a symbol for no one's redemption." The poem is a reclaiming of their own, and our, humanity.

The main impetus for Undersong seems to have been Lorde's desire to revise earlier work. Lorde says in the short but significant introduction: "The process of revision is, I believe, crucial to the integrity and lasting power of a poem." The revisions here are mostly stylistic: changing line breaks, simplifying punctuation, or inserting white space in place of punctuation. Lorde also deletes some small words, such as connectives, where the meaning is clear without them. For example, the original version of a 1959 poem, "Suspension," reads:

We entered silence
before the clock struck.

Red wine into crystal
is not quite
fallen
air solidifies around your mouth

The new version looks like this:

We entered silence
before the clock struck

red wine into crystal
not quite
fallen
the air solidifies
around your mouth

On the whole, these changes make the poems more readable to today's readers, as well as more characteristic of Lorde's mature style. Lorde has revised with restraint and wisdom, and subtle levels of meaning in the poems have been illuminated. But, had she not changed them, the poems would still stand. And although the revised style seems comfortable to readers now, it will inevitably seem dated in twelve or twenty or a hundred years.

It seems to me that poems change constantly over the years, decades, and centuries. We read the poems of Sappho, although they are, unfortunately, not the poems she wrote. New translations give us new versions of poems. We tend to think of the printed word as immutable, but it's not. Updated editions of seventeenth-century poems by John Donne or Aphra Behn alter punctuation, spelling, even diction, to make them more "readable" and their meaning more clear to a modern audience. This is, in fact, exactly what Lorde has done to her own early work.

I think readers want one version to be "The Poem." Maybe that's wrong. But once that poem has been read and loved and used, it becomes the reader's. She or he might not accept even an author's revision of it. And for those of us who memorize poems we love, the poem changes in odd ways as we forget one word or substitute another. The oral nature of poetry necessitates change. This is especially relevant for Lorde's work, which is often read out loud at rallies and other ceremonies.

In Undersong's introduction, Lorde writes: "The problem in reworking any poem is always when to let go of it, refusing to give in to the desire to have that particular poem do it all, say it all, become the mythical, unattainable Universal Poem." Collections of selected poems of "important" poets usually follow the "greatest hits" formula. But, when one reads old books of poetry by just about any "major" poet, it's a relief to find that not every poem is a "good," much less a great poem. By making her own "selected works," Lorde confirms the principle of transformation and growth, validates the importance of process over product, and shows the poet as a living, learning, changing person.

I remember vividly the first time I read Lorde's poem "The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors." I was walking past pillared rows of fraternity houses at the college I attended. In defiance and self-affirmation, I shouted the words of the poem out loud: "I did not fall from the sky / I / nor descend like a plague of locusts / to drink color and strength from the earth." And I remember holding on, as if nothing else could save me, to the words from "Chorus": "Sun / make me whole again / to love / the shattered truths of me / spilling out like dragon's teeth." Lorde's work was Black, urban, lesbian, radical. I was a shy, white, suburban, middle-class teenager, barely sexual in any direction, but her work spoke directly to me. I knew I wouldn't let go of its challenge, which I found as intimidating as it was exciting and irresistible: to deny nothing; to strip yourself down to the truths you most fear; to believe in the living importance of poetry.