Selected Poems

By Gwendolyn Brooks

Book Overview

Selected Poems is the classic volume by the distinguished and celebrated poet Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This compelling collection showcases Brooks's technical mastery, her warm humanity, and her compassionate and illuminating response to a complex world. This edition also includes a special PS section with insights, interviews, and more--including a short piece by Nikki Giovanni entitled Remembering Gwen.

By 1963 the civil rights movement was in full swing across the United States, and more and more African American writers were increasingly outspoken in attacking American racism and insisting on full political, economic, and social equality for all. In that memorable year of the March on Washington, Harper & Row released Brooks's Selected Poems, which incorporated poems from her first three collections, as well as a selection of new poems.

This edition of Selected Poems includes A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks's first published volume of poetry for which she became nationally known and which led to successive Guggenheim fellowships; Annie Allen, published one year before she became the first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize in any category; and The Bean Eaters, her fifth publication which expanded her focus from studies of the lives of mainly poor urban black Americans to the heroism of early civil rights workers and events of particular outrage--including the 1955 Emmett Till lynching and the 1957 school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060882964
• ISBN13: 9780060882969
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

It. Was. Signed.

Yall. I grabbed the cheapest copy available to be able to use a reward— and it was signed by Gwendolyn Brooks ❤️

Great Collection of a Modern Social Poet

Various editions of "Selected Poems" by the late Gwendolyn Brooks are floating around, most of which only have differences in layout or binding. All have the core poems that defined Brooks as one of America's poets with a social conscience. In the spirit of Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes, and occasionally, Robert Frost, her poetry meets the reader head-on. However, to Brooks' credit, and what makes her a great poet, is she sees the big picture, just her greatly skilled colleagues listed above. Brooks was black. She neither hid it, nor would be ashamed that I said so. Many of her poems revolved around the issues impacting African Americans, both the responsibility they have, as well as an acknowledgment of the difficulties they endure because of racism and cultural differences. Her poems will survive (and are worth reading today) because they were not shackled to the political milieu of the day. What she wrote in the 1940s, when racism was bolder and more detrimental than today, matters. She was current, yet eternal. Even though "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till" refers to a young man murdered decades ago, the reader without that context will still appreciates its common-spoken depth (her indents are diminished in my copy below because of the software to post this): after the murder, after the burial Emmett's mother is a pretty-faced thing; the tint of pulled taffy. She sits in a red room, drinking black coffee. She kisses her killed boy. And she is sorry. Chaos in windy grays through a red prairie. Award-winning, and well-celebrated toward the end of her life, Brooks complete collection of poems is a valuable lesson in compassion, speaking with strong poetic voice, and honesty. For the reader looking for an introduction to Brooks' poetry without having to work through the vast complete works would do well to start here. I fully recommend "Selected Poems" by Gwendolyn Brooks. Anthony Trendl editor, HungarianBookstore.com

My Comments

This is a wonderful book for both children and adults. If you like poems, then you should definetly read this book.

Gwendolyn Brooks is Magnificient

Five stars! If I had to choose the ten greatest books of the twentieth century, Brooks' Selected Poems would have to be one of them. Her voice is entirely original - no one who came before Brooks or follows her writes quite like her. Brooks' work is distinguished by so many wonderful qualities - she may have the best ear of any living American poet. Her sense of the musicality of language rivals that of Yeats and Dylan Thomas (as in, say, "A Sunset of the City," "We Real Cool," "Big Bessie throws her son into the street, and her great long poem, "Riot."). I once heard Gwendolyn Brooks read over twenty years ago when I was in college, and I still haven't forgotten the sound of her voice, and with it the dawn of my understanding that poetry is half-music, half-language. Brooks is also capable of that kind of clarity and brilliance of imagery that you find in the best William Carlos Williams Poems. (Read, for example, "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till" or "My Little `Bout Town Gal"). What has always been most special about her work for me, however, is the way Brooks captures nuances of feeling, multi-layers of emotion, in a few phrases, as in her very contemporary poem about abortion, "the mother," or her love poem, "A Lovely Love." The only other poet I know of who does this so well is Emily Dickinson.

We's Not So Cool

It's a shame some people sit in their Wall Street Towers and, not having any apparent experience with the real world, judge harshly those who not only live in it, but interpret it into literary masterpieces. Those who find solace in maligning Gwendolyn Brook's poetry should take a much closer second look. Her poetry transcends all barriers. Her subjects are the embodiment of all of us, poor or rich. Ms. Brooks' poetry shoots straight to the soul, exposing it; and, the soul knows not color, race, creed, or ethnicity. Ms. Brooks is a national treasure, our collective national conscience. Her poetry is a reflection of today's society - good or bad, clean or dirty. Isn't it a shock to look into the mirror after all the facades are melted away and discover that none of us are really "all of that?"

Great book

This is a wonderful collection of poems, Brooks's best. I understand why Langston Hughes has received so much attention over the last several decades--his first-person commentary and description of Black life in the twentieth century is valuable and enlightening--but Brooks, at her best (i.e., in this book), is a better poet than Hughes was at his best, and I'm a little miffed that she hasn't received more credit by the general public than she has. It is just that this volume won the Pulizter Prize, and it will certainly be around for some time.