The Homeplace: Poems

by Marilyn Nelson

Finalist for the 1991 National Book Award

In The Homeplace, the stories of a family become the history of a people as Marilyn Nelson Waniek sketches the lives descended from her great-great-grandmother Diverne.

The poet’s mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, inspired this volume when she bequeathed to Waniek from her deathbed the tales that had shaped her life. The first section of the book presents those stories transformed into graceful, humorous, and deeply touching poems.

In the book’s second section Waniek honors her late father, Melvin Nelson, and tells the story of his “family”: the fabled group of black World War II aviators known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Using the language and perspective of her father and his comrades, Waniek explores through a few of their individual stories the hardships and achievements of the thousand black flyers trained at Tuskegee Institute.

Throughout The Homeplace, the reader is involved in a series of sharply portrayed lives. By telling a continuous story in a mix of free verse and traditional forms, Waniek gives her work pace and intensity. She handles the villanelle, the sonnet, and the popular ballad with equal skill and gusto.

“I just knew we were going to live some history,” Johnnie Nelson said at the end of her life. Her daughter has produced an eloquent homage to that history, celebrating the survival of Afro-American pride.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Marilyn Nelson is the author of many acclaimed books for young people and adults, including CARVER: A LIFE IN POEMS, a Newbery Honor Book and Coretta Scott King Honor Book, and A WREATH FOR EMMETT TILL, a Printz Honor Book and Coretta Scott King Honor Book. She also translated THE LADDER, a picture book by Halfdan Rasmussen. She lives in East Haddam, Connecticut.

For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/marilyn-...

Reviews

[Jean Feldeisen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In colorful language tinged with humor, emotion, and innuendo, the poet tells the story of generations of her black and mixed family members. She portrays the black experience of living, loving, raising children, and protecting them in an often hostile, often manipulative white society. I enjoyed her playful experimenting with forms, her precise descriptions, and her perfectly realized use of dialogue. And some masterful metaphors such as this one: "She honed his body's yearnings to a keen, sharp point."

[Priscilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

The family photographs interspersed among Marilyn Nelson' s beautiful poems add an additional window into the soul of a Black family in the south after the civil war. It is real in a way that is haunting and life-giving at the same time. The poems are works of truth. This kind of delivery of this particular history is rare. A treasure. The poem "Daughters, 1900" is included in a recent (2025) anthology and that is what alerted me to the existence of this collection (1990). I am grateful I was able to track it down.

[Kris Dersch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiring and gorgeous. Marilyn Nelson traces 4 generations of her family through poetry, from slavery to the desegregation of the military, dividing her slim volume into generations. Equal parts optimistic and gut-wrenching, she utilizes different kinds and lengths of poetry like the master she is. Makes me want to write one on my own family...but not as well... She is a treasure.

[Charlene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the 3rd very short book of narrative poetry by Marilyn Nelson that I've read. Taken as a whole, these poems tell the story of Nelson's mother's family from c. 1860 enslavement to 1960. Several of the final poems are about her father, one of the original WW2 Tuskegee airmen. She does an amazing job of giving a picture of people and lives in just a few well chosen words.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Waniek's genius is less in specific turns of phrase, and more in the poetic architecture of the whole collection, a family history told in individual poems. I've never read anything like it.

[Libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This slender volume of finely crafted poems is divided in two parts: the first part consists of poems that describe the author's lineage and history, complete with pictures. The second part is devoted to poems honoring the Tuskegee airmen, the first black military air force unit of which her father was one. The poems are tightly crafted and powerful. For folks used to reading other types of poetry, this book is a real treat, both in the form and the content.

[Gineen · Rating 4 out of 5]

wonderful powerful poetry