The Collected Poems

by Sterling A. Brown, Michael S. Harper (Editor)

Arguably the greatest African American poet of the century, Sterling Brown was instrumental in bringing the traditions of African American folk life to readers all over the world. This is the definitive collection of Brown's poems, and the only edition available in the United States.

Genres: Poetry, African American, Literature

267 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is thanks to Cornelius Eady that I came to these poems. Cornelius praised their music and Brown's particular contribution to scholarship and craft (and probably more). I hear it. All kinds of things are happening here (song, argument, story, lament) -- and at times a documenting like Carl Sandburg's and Alan Lomax.

Many of these poems are jarring -- and now have the additional layer of time to make that shove hurt.

Southern Cop

Let us forgive Ty Kendricks.
The place was Darktown. He was young.
His nerves were jittery. The day was hot.
The Negro ran out of the alley.
And so he shot.

Let us understand Ty Kendricks.
The Negro must have been dangerous,
Because he ran;
And here was a rookie with a chance
To prove himself a man.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sterling Brown brought the voices of African Americans and the blues to poetry. What he does with capturing diction and voice and form is powerful, and just when you think you have his aesthetic pegged, he does something different. Gritty, observant, biting, and emotionally relevant, these poems are a powerful testimony to an important strand of American literature.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brown is a fine poet who, while admittedly sometimes sounding like Langston Hughes, did not overproduce like Hughes.

[Pachyderm Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sterling A. Brown appears reminiscent of a more sophisticated version of both Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Langston Hughes while mining both the depth and breadth of the American Negro experience during the twentieth century.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite Poems:
“Ma Rainey”
“Old Lem”

[Joe]

Father Missouri, in his dotage
Whimsical and drunkenly turbulent,
Cuts away the banks, steals away the loam,
Washes the ground from under wire fences,
Leaves fenceposts grotesquely dangling in the air;
And with doddering steps approaches the shanties.

Reading Brown for his allegorization of the river in Southern Road as a sharecropper's landlord/creepy old man waiting to swallow the work of the African American communities on its banks, how they chart systems of property which make these communities most vulnerable to ecological catastrophe in lines that are both biting and empathetic and in a black vernacular that exists within heavy quotations / which Brown absorbed as essentially a folklorist (see the endlessly thorny issues around that--the production of 'authentic' voice, still considering). See, also, poems featuring the Missouri (the river that runs into St. Louis where T.S. Eliot's pop owned a brick factory) / relation to explosion of Katrina literature (the disaster always subordinated to 9-11 in nat'l consciousness) / relation to Douglas Kearney's work, his subversive sampling of stereotypical registers. The question of nostalgia hangs over my whole reading/consumption of and, as R Williams notes, any depiction of idealized vernacular landscape. That nostalgia has a double force for me given Brown was a D.C. poet, most likely influenced the poetics of one of my most important early teachers of poetry (Lucille Clifton), and is writing about a terrain which I'm nostalgic for--the river. Yet Brown's South is almost never idyllic--it exists within racist schemes of property (haunted by the plantation) that make existence precarious and which puts many of his figures on the run. What is celebrates is not place but the resourcefulness of his characters in struggling against it (the wearing repetition/galvanizing of the blues). Also seems reductive to see Brown as only "handling folk materials," his Southern road leads to the northern city, to which he devotes many poems. This is a weak reading of this rich poetry so far and unfortunately my work is either going to take me forward or backward in time from it.

[Meg Richey · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Modern American Poetry FA 2014

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful poems—bluesy, ironic, funny, shocking at times in an understated way, evocative of the long sweep and diversity of African American history and experience.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish this were taught in schools instead of Langston Hughes.