Poets so often are apologetic these noisy days, and Rosellen Brown is no exception. She apologizes for the fact that "poems are not action," and contests what she has written with "real events." Well, though one can understand what she is getting at, she is wrong. Her poems [collected in Some Deaths in the Delta,] are an event, and the work and love that went into them a form of action. At least one phase of the so-called civil rights struggle is over. But for a few years a certain torch glowed in the South, and men and women and children came to it and felt its heat and helped hold it up for the world to see. Rosellen Brown was among those who came: white, a Yankee, she … took part in many efforts to make the South a place where "liberty and justice for all" can be found. As the title of her book suggests, the task is an enormous one….

[Those] who leave and go North find another hell up there, as the second part of this collection of poems emphasizes. For the author eventually returned to New York, and learned (as have so many others before her) that once awakened, the old kind of sleep comes hard. Mississippi made her a less satisfied New Yorker. Now she is not only a damn Yankee, but perhaps a touch un-American. She wants us to measure up to those young Americans of both races she knew in the South in the middle sixties. Though she spends many of her lines setting down the sad ironies and outright evils which plague life in the South, she lets us know from time to time that there is no escaping those ironies and evils, certainly not by crossing the Mason-Dixon line. In doing so she demonstrates a willingness to avoid ideological rancor and rhetorical postures of one sort or another. She loves the people she spent so much time with, and in these poems gives voice to their "life"—their hopes, doubts, assets, handicaps. She has a right to feel that only the successive storming of various Bastilles are acts, but no doubt in many towns of the Delta there are individuals who have been in the past grateful for what Rosellen Brown the teacher and social activist has meant to them—and who are now grateful that she has chosen to speak out so intensely and honestly on their, on America's behalf.