Selected Poems

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.