[In the following review, Brown offers positive evaluation of Beckonings.]

This special edition of Gwendolyn Brook's Beckonings can be found on the local library shelf in a beige and chocolate cover. The poems will have private meanings for most poets. In 1975, I was writing the poems which were published in Lightyears. Gwendolyn Brooks was one of those distant ethereal figures whose works I stood in line to buy at bookstores. Her volumes were curiously hard to obtain. Fortunately, for me and about twenty-five other people, the Poet Laureate of Illinois and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize read at the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania on April 26, 1983. Her reading was sponsored by Dr. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations as well as the President and Provost of the University. Before the reading, the endowers of Dr. Baker's chair were introduced, and the establishment of the Albert I. Greenfield Intercultural Center on the campus. This was truly an auspicious occasion!

Ms. Brooks' reading marked a turning point in several careers. In fact, she seemed to charm everyone who came into her presence. She spoke slowly and patiently. In fact she is the most cautious public, reader of the Afro-American poets, perhaps, of all poets. She read from a spectrum of her works, pausing to explain the legal controversies and critical battles that have surrounded her publication. Gwendolyn Brooks is not now associated with poetic licenses, yet it is difficult to imagine how closely her legacy parallels that of our outstanding political leaders. Present at the reading was Daniel Hoffman, an expert on Carl Sandburg, whose job Ms. Brooks now holds.

The reissue of Beckonings features a pencil drawing of the poet by her brother, Raymond Brooks, on the back cover—her broad nose, set grimace, soft eyes. The critical comment is by the late Hoyt Fuller: "The aching loveliness of these poems is sometimes close to unbearable. Through the magic of Gwendolyn Brooks' words, we hold in our souls' eye a vivid image of our beauty, we glimpse what we might yet be. An incredible woman, this poet: she would urge us into our ultimate, our transcendent humanity, with her love."

A dozen poems begin with a tribute to her brother's memory, "Raymond Melvin Brooks": "He knew how to put paint to paper—/made the paper speak and sing. / But he was chiefly a painter of days and the daily, / with a talent for life color, life pattern: / a talent for jeweling use and the usual, / a talent for practical style." The ordinariness which she brings to the extraordinary rescues the simplicity seen in the ornamentation of objects and events. It is with no small solemnity one reflects on the eight years that have passed since the publication of the poems, with their nuances of swagger in speech, the acknowledgment, abruptly, as poetry tends to do, of more awesome horizons. For example, this poem, "To John Oliver Killens in 1975":

    John,
    look at our mercy, the massiveness that it is not.
    Look at our "unity," look at our
    "black solidarity."
    Dim, dull and dainty.
    Ragged. And we
    grow colder; we
    grow colder.
    See our
    tatter-time.
 
    You were a mender.
 
    You were a sealer of tremblings and long trepidations.
    And always, with you, the word kindness was not
    a jingling thing but an
    eye-tenderizer, a
    heart-honeyer.
 
    Therefore, we turn, John, to you.
    Interrupting self-raiding. We pause in our falling.
    To ask another question of your daylight.

These poems have an amazing informality, not at all like the preachments of epic Annie Allen or the looming sermons of In the Mecca. They pop with humor, invade the speech with warning, paint a too familiar horror. Gwendolyn Brooks has become, in some sense, unbelievable. Her poems stand at the crossroads between "we live" and "we used to live." She has always spoken with a kind of musical understatement. In Beckonings, she blends the Homeric meter which qualifies her heir to the throne of Carl Sandburg with the bending, flattering tones of a Duke Ellington trumpet.

After her reading at Pennsylvania, Ms. Brooks shook hands, autographed books, and gave advice. Surrounded by benefactors, professors, filmmakers, poets, and the ever-present admiration of youth, she appeared to carry the responsibility of her position in the world of poetry with a bowed, respectful mien.