[In the following review, Randall presents an appreciation of Jordan's skill and thematic range in Haruko/Love Poems.]

June Jordan's work, at this point and for many years now, is perfect. That is, not a word too many, none too few, nothing at all other than it must be. She says exactly what she means to say, and says it so powerfully that the reader (or fortunate, listener) hears each phrase; isolated, made specific, an essential part of the whole. From the collected poems in Naming Our Destiny to the precise columns in The Progressive and spartan essays (Civil Wars; On Call, South End, and Technical Difficulties), hers is a voice that epitomizes wise sister, alter ego, conscience, song. She manages to tap that place where race and sexuality, class and justice, gender and memory come together. She doesn't go with the cutting-edge idea but reaches for that difficult terrain where others may fear to tread.

I have yet to teach a college class in which I haven't read out loud Jordan's essay "Many Rivers to Cross" at one of the early sessions. It focuses the students. And renews my sense that we have writers now—most of them women, many of them women of color—who simply know how to say what must be said, with brilliance.

Haruko/Love Poems is an ambitious collection. The poems that make up its first part speak of and to a love that fails. Or does it? This is love in its most comprehensive definition. Perhaps it would be better to say that love here does not follow the boy-meets-girl-and-both-enjoy-happy-ending formula. This is the love of one woman for another, one culture for another, one age for another; and the happy ending doesn't happen.

Jordan's narrative takes us through the heights and pits of passion: "… my soul adrift / the whole night sky denies me light / without you," And,

       Wind chimes murmuring into the atmosphere
       and high above this peaceful house
       a 90 year old willow tree
       sucks on the sunlight
       with a thousand toothless leaves …

Then cradles itself in lines of affirmation:

     … I do,
     I ride these tracks to meet you:
     moving through
     an upright register
     of shadow and of light
     moving through
     eclectic ganglia of open cities
     nervous
     nowhere immaculate nowhere a mystery
     to match this urban earthquake travelling
     stop by stop
     into reunion
     with the highway wonder
     of your eyes.

The last of the Haruko poems ends:

     … the roots
     for a connection that can keep
     Japan and San Francisco
     and Jamaica and Decorah
     Iowa and Norway
     all in one place palpable
     to any sweet belief
     move deep below
     apparent differences of turf
     I trace them in the lifeline
     of an open palm
     a hand that works
     its homemade heat
     against the jealous
     hibernating blindness
     of the night
     plum blossom plum jam
     even the tree becomes something
     more than a skeleton
     longing for the sky.

Neither is Jordan's fine humor absent: "'Haruko: / Oh! It's like stringbean in French?' / 'No; / It's like hurricane / in English!'" Or the poem "Taiko Dojo Messages from Haruko" with nothing more than variations on the word no. The poet wrote the poems to Haruko and put this entire collection together at a time when—in her own words—she "could not, by [herself], do many things." She was suffering from breast cancer, that plague which has taken so many women from us. Survival must have required such energy. And yet these poems, this collection, is living testimony to the fact that we often do more than we know. Facing death, the great artist pushes through to the other side.

The second part of the book gathers earlier love poems, 1970–91. Here again, the meaning of love is stretched. And in these poems it does not move through the space of a single relationship but many: the Roman poems (to men, man), the beautiful "Poem for Joy" (for the poet Joy Harjo, and dedicated to the entire Creek Tribe of North America), the extraordinary "The Reception," and "Poem for Mark" in which so much of Jordan's exquisite ability to merge race, class, global and other visions comes together:

      England, I thought, will look like Africa
      or India with elephants and pale men
      pushing things about
      rifles and gloves
      handlebar mustache and tea
      pith helmets
      riding crop
      the Holy Bible
      and a rolled up map of plunder
      possibilities …

The word "map" in the next to last line of the preceding fragment reads "man" in the book, but I wonder (I believe it is a typo, or should be). In any case the poem continues, ending as the political becomes absolutely personal: "I knew / whoever the hell 'my people' / are / I knew that one of them / is you."

One last look at what Jordan can do with words, the way she has of saying so much more than their sum:

     OK. So she got back the baby
     but what happened to the record player?
     No shit. The authorized appropriation
     contradicts my falling out of love?
     You're wrong. It's not that I gave away my keys.
     The problem is nobody wants to steal me or my house.

This is "Onesided Dialog." Jordan's poems convince us one side is both, or all we'll ever need.