James Weldon Johnson

Cornelius Eady

Michael S. Harper

Sterling Stuckey

Sterling A. Brown

Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown

Anthony Walton

An anthology representing more than two hundred years of African American creative poetic endeavors features the work of fifty-two poets

The Vintage Book of African American Poetry

Story-telling, the blues and jazz are very much part of Michael Harper's background, and it is therefore hardly surprising that this extraordinary collection by one of America's leading poets is full of a music and a rhythm that is both compelling and deeply moving. Concerned with the often painful historical legacies of family and race, Harper re-visits personal and black history in these poems, in which we not only hear the driving syncopations and heady improvisations of Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis but also the cadences of those towering literary figures - among them Yeats and Keats - that have so much influenced him.

Selected Poems

For decades, Michael S. Harper has written poetry that speaks with many voices. His work teems with poetry configured as awe, poetry as courtship, and poetry as elegy and homage. Infused with tales and riddles, sass and satire and surprise, Harper’s poetry takes the form of psalms, jazz experiments, soft serenades, and radical provocations. In Use Trouble, his first major collection since Songlines in Michaeltree, Harper renews poetry as the art of taking nothing for granted. In three groups--"The Fret Cycle," "Use Trouble," and "I Do Believe in People"--he draws on his seemingly inexhaustible resources to paint, sing, sympathize, and sorrow. Here are his tributes to his father and family, his irrepressible playfulness, and his lifelong romance between poetry and music.

Use Trouble

New and Selected Poems

Images of Kin

Songlines in Michaeltree is the long-awaited collected poems--with the sparkling addition of some new ones--of one of America's most revered poets. Hailed by critics as a distinctive and powerful presence in contemporary American poetry, Michael S. Harper is an artist and a truth teller who tempers his astonishing technical virtuosity with a compassionate and healing vision. A keen observer and a potent commentator, Harper calls a complacent society vigorously to account while cradling the wounded and remembering the lost. Calling Harper "one of the finest poets of our time . . . [and] one of the most human and humane," George Cuomo of the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle observed, "Harper's poetry has drawn its vitality from the incredible energy of his language and the honesty of his perceptions." Songlines in Michaeltree is a magnificent celebration of Harper's continuing, unstinting gifts.

New and Collected Poems

Songlines in Michaeltree

Poems

Dear John, Dear Coltrane

A collection of rhythmic poems with such varied themes as pain, love, and the experience of jazz

Michael S. Harper

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