As a vision of America, "Images of Kin" could have been the epilogue to Hart Crane's masterpiece, "The Bridge"—were Crane alive today to see the country in less-than-glorious light. Michael Harper has been publishing his poetry since 1970, and by now it is more than obvious that he has been writing steadily on one theme. He is passionately identified with the history of his people. As it was for Crane, history is, for Mr. Harper, a personal matter, but he, as a black man, carries in him the burden of the past enslavement of his race and, unlike Crane, who wrote to celebrate this country, for Mr. Harper the problem is to relieve himself of his burden. It is the storm center of his poems and it has made for a writing that could not have come easily.

Like Crane, who also had his knotted passages, Mr. Harper has objectified and made painfully vivid what in any other mode could have become simply crying for mercy or sententious talk. It is Mr. Harper's achievement to have projected his most difficult and complex insights and feelings through the epical manner, yet at the same time carried us along to identify with him.

In the section of the new poems called "Healing Songs," he begins looking for his own personal resolution and ease, as if he had found himself at last in tune with his society. There is a guarded reaching out for tenderness with others, and some measure of amusement, too, as for instance in … part of the third stanza from "Dining From a Treed Condition, An Historical Survey":…

     Told to saw off a limb on Mr. White's place
     he sat on the limb vigorously sawing the obstructing
     branch; dazed after a loud crack, on the ground
     Tom cried to Mr. White: "Oh, no Sah! I had the good
     fortune to land on mah head."

Of course it is an amusing poem, and is so intended, even in its references to the master-and-slave relationship. The fact that Mr. Harper has created this new perspective for himself, without bitterness or loss of dignity to himself, speaks volumes about a whole new advance in Mr. Harper's career.