Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010

by Elizabeth Alexander

The first career retrospective by the award-winning poet Elizabeth Alexander, including her poem delivered at Barack Obama's presidential inauguration

We crave radiance in this austere world,
light in the spiritual darkness.
Learning is the one perfect religion,
its path correct, narrow, certain, straight.
—from "Allegiance"


Over twenty years, Elizabeth Alexander has become one of America's most exciting and important poets, and her selection as the inaugural poet by President Obama confirmed her place as one of the indispensable voices of our time. Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 gathers twenty pages of new poetry, along with generous selections from her previous work. The result is the definitive volume to date by this American master.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies

240 pages, Hardcover

First published September 28, 2010

About the author

Elizabeth Alexander is a Quantrell Award-winning American poet, essayist, playwright, university professor, and scholar of African-American literature and culture. She teaches English language/literature, African-American literature, and gender studies at Yale University. Alexander was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard during the 2007-08 academic year.

Alexander's poems, short stories, and critical writings have been widely published in such journals and periodicals as The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Village Voice, The Women's Review of Books, and The Washington Post. Her play Diva Studies, which was performed at Yale's School of Drama, garnered her a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship as well as an Illinois Arts Council award.

On December 17th, 2008 it was announced that she will compose a poem which she shall recite at the Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama in January 2009.

Reviews

[Stephanie Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We crave radiance in this austere world, light in the spiritual darkness.” 💖

[Jasonlylescampbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very good. The poems, as I had heard when she was interviewed, are in celebration of her culture. They invited me in (what all books do) and I was able to see beauty and also find lots of connection. Here are a few bits that I enjoyed:

Tending (I think that was the title it was a poem about her father ... getting their breakfast ready, cutting the fruit):

I could feel
the heft of unuttered love in his tending
our small bodies, love a silent, mammoth thing
that overwhelmed me.

There were series of poems about historical happenings: one on Amistad the famous slave ship and court drama that followed its arrival. And another about Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color. It was from the book was named:

"Allegiance"
Teacher is bewildered when packages
and letters come from far to say how brave,
how visionary, how stare-down-the-beast
is Prudence Crandall of Canterbury.
Work, she says, there is always work to do,
not in the name of self but in the name,
the water-clarity of what is right.
We crave radiance in this austere world,
light in the spiritual darkness.
Learning is the one perfect religion,
its path correct, narrow, certain, straight.
At its end it blossoms and billows
into vari-colored polyphony:

the sweet infinity of true knowledge.

[Luis Correa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I let out the most unimpressed "Meh!" after I finished. She's got three amazing poems in there. Maybe if I had read the books on their own terms rather than the selected poetry, I tend to feel this way after collections. As a poet, overall, though, Alexander doesn't do it for me.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's going to be tough to write an honest review of this book. Crave Radiance is a collection of Alexander's poetry drawn from five of her previous books (1990 - 2007) along with fifteen new poems. I don't care much for Alexander's style...it's bland and often she resorts to simply listing objects rather than creating a vivid image, for example, her poem "Other Cargo" (p. 194):

Saddles and bridles,
bolts of ribbon,
calico, muslin, silk,
beans, bread, books,
gloves, raisins, cologne,
olives, mirrors, vermicelli,
parasols, rice, black bombazine.

The entire strength of Alexander's poetry lies in her subject matter. Almost all of her poems are about black identity/black community. She writes about Harlem, slavery, segregation, police brutality, African language, the etymology of "nigger," ritual, jazz; and she references a seemingly endless amount of Africans and African Americans: Joseph Cinque, Stokely Carmichael, Adam Clayton Powell, Aunt Jemima, The Supremes, Jesse Owens, Rodney King, Fats Waller, Toni Morrison, Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Josephine Baker, Benjamin Banneker, and more. Alexander counts on these ideas being interesting enough to make up for her mediocre writing. Reading this book was educational since I hadn't heard of some of the historical events she discusses, like the Amistad slave ship or Canterbury v. Prudence Crandall. I also admire how openly she writes about her culture and shines a spotlight on many of its often underappreciated heroes.

Although race is the primary theme of this collection, Alexander also writes about motherhood. This is a subject that doesn't interest me in the slightest. When she isn't writing about history, famous people, or her kids, her poems can be intensely confessional, such as when she writes "That was my slut year" (p. 83 "Body of Life") or " Small story, hair story, Afro-American story/only-black-girl-in-my-class story/pre-adolescence story, black-teacher story" (p.159 "Tina Green").

As I was reading, I found that there were very few poems that I enjoyed, but there are a number of poems that would be great for teaching poetry ("Apollo," "For Miriam," "Ars Poetica #100: I Believe," "Narrative: Ali"). The simplicity of Alexander's words combined with heavy subject matter in these poems is a powerful combination. Unfortunately, the majority of the book is simple words with heavy subject matter, and it got stale. Although Alexander is definitely a highly educated and ambitious person, it's my opinion that her poetry is only important because of it's celebration of/pandering to African American identity.

Poems that I liked:

"Letter: Blues," "Stravinsky in L.A.," "Washington Étude," "L.A. by Night," "Equinox," "Black Poets Talk About the Dead," "Autumn Passage;" "Apollo," "For Miriam," "Ars Poetica #100: I Believe," "Narrative: Ali," "Allegiance."

=12/151 (7.9%) poems that I liked.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is closer to a 3-star rating for me, but because it includes Praise Song for the Day (the inaugural poem for Obama’s first term), I raised it to a 4. I appreciate so many of Alexander’s phrases throughout the book. Many of her poems are narrative style, which is not my preference. So, overall, lots to appreciate in this volume.

[James G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

exquisite and historic.

[John Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Obama inaugural poem is rightly praised, but her other historical poems (extended sequences about the Amistad and a school for Black girls in Connecticut) are the highlights of this collection.

[Diann Blakely]

Having followed Alexander's work for many years, my sole complaint with CRAVE RADIANCE is that it isn't fatter--indeed, I've thought more than once how interesting small pamphlets, along the lines of that made by Graywolf for "Praise Song for the Day," could be devised for Alexander's "dream poems" and for those about hair. Harlem-born, Alexander moved early to Washington: woven into her heritage is her father’s part in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, specifically the “Great Society” and its tapestry of programs. Too many of these have unravelled, and too frequently has Alexander been labelled “our most recent inaugural poet,” for she has, since that time, published a second book of essays, POWER AND POSSIBILITY; this edition of selected poems; and one of the pieces in Katharine Coles’ indispensable collection, BLUEPRINTS. Subtitled "Bringing Poets into Communities," a free download awaits at http: www.poetryfoundation/org/blueprints. 

I had another reminder of Alexander in a recent poetry and "back-to-school days" article by David Bielspiel in THE OREGONIAN, which ends with what he calls a good description of the art's idiosyncrasy and timelessness: http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.... The poem with which he closes is from AMERICAN SUBLIME, also published by Graywolf (2005) and one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. CRAVE RADIANCE itself is a nominee for the prestigious Hurston/Wright Award, whose winner will be announced November, 2011 (http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Th...).

[John Otto · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of poems written by Elizabeth Alexander over the last 20 years. One of Ms. Alexander's poetry books was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. She read her poem, "Praise Song for the Day," at Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009. She has won a number of poetry awards and is chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale. So, obviously, smarter people than me think she is a great poet. It would take more chutzpah than I have, a simple, unlearned Amish boy, to criticize this book. I just know what I like. And I don't like this poetry.

I suppose the purpose of publishing a book of mostly previously-published poetry by a particular author is to show how the author has developed over the years. I will grant you that the latter poems appeal to me more than the early poems. (So, why not just leave out the early poems? Because I don't know what I'm talking about when I don't like these poems. They're great; they must be great because the experts have said so.) It's not that I hate all poetry. When I'm inaugurated as president, I want Julia Kasdorf to read one of her poems. Or, if she is busy, Billy Collins will do. Elizabeth Alexander? I'll let her sit on the platform, but no poetry please.

[Zara Raab · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the poem “Passage,” Elizabeth Alexander movingly tells the story of a slave who escapes his master by hiding in a coffin; elsewhere she captures the outsider experiences of contemporary blacks, as in “Apollo,” when a black family pulls over in New England to watch TV footage of the first moon walk, their blackness strangely unnoticed because the astronauts are “stranger, stranger/even than we are.” With her expressive feel for the texture and rhythms of its culture, Alexander is a lyric historian of African American life, peopling her poems with artists, athletes, statesmen, heroes and poets of different times and places: photographer James Van Der Zee, painter and collagist Romare Rearden, singer Josephine Baker, boxer Muhammad Ali, Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Al, musicians Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk. Alexander also draws on her middle class upbringing in Washington, D.C., but there is much here, too, about becoming an adult, a wife, and a mother. Following Robert Frost, poet of John Kennedy’s brief presidency, Alexander delivered a poem at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Chair of African American Studies at Yale, she has published steadily since //The Venus Hottentot// in 1990. //Crave Radiance// includes poems from each of her five books, plus 15 new poems.

[Nan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Alexander writes poems primarily of the African-American experience with great clarity and passion. Her "Praise Song for the Day" was delivered at Obama's 2009 inauguration and includes the following: "Say it plain: that many have died for this day,/Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,/who laid the train track, raised the bridges,/ picked the cotton and the lettuce, built/ brick by brick the glittering edifices/ they would then keep clean and work inside of./Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day/Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,/the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.../In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,/anything can be made, any sentence begun."

That was a moment.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Came back to these poems after a time away and realized I liked them a lot more than I remembered. For instance, rediscovering the poem she wrote for Obama's first inaugural, after the Trump years, was revelatory. Now the poem seems almost prophetic about a future that wasn't or wasn't yet. It's a beautiful poem. I didn't realize that in 2009.

[Caroljean · Rating 4 out of 5]

She inhabits historical figures and makes them real.

[Karlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poetry is historic and personal telling stories for all to appreciate. "Praise Song for the Day" was delivered at President Obama's inauguration.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

So very beautiful