Blues: For All the Changes

May 1, 1999
Social and/or political poetry often fails because it loses touch with humanity; it gets distracted by issues and forgets about the impact of things on people. Giovanni never loses sight of the people in her work. In poems built with broken lines and paragraphs of prose, she spars with the ills that confront us, but every struggle has a human face. Ask Roger Woody, of the Woody Pipe and Excavating Company, who is destroying the wonderful woodland adjacent to Giovanni's home and readying it for a new housing development. When a young basketball star is harassed for his youth and style ("Iverson"), she assumes the role of compassionate but stern sister. She is no less forthcoming with her opinions of the President and his woes. At times you wonder what makes these soapbox oratories poems. You will not find many familiar rhetorical devices here, but you will want to dance to the music, the rhythms and language, the sound and exacting energy of these poems--which is more than enough.--Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia

Copyright 1999 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 1999
Giovanni is as socially conscious, outspoken, and roguishly funny as ever in her new poems. Matching her powerful voice to the supple cadence of the blues, a perfect vehicle for irony, she hammers away at the racism that continues to warp and strangle American life, but she writes of pleasure, too, of good food and good friends, lovers and family. Agile and spirited, Giovanni relishes sports metaphors and tough language. She sings out in praise of the civil rights movement and its innovative and gutsy poets and presents tributes to black soldiers, Jackie Robinson, and Betty Shabazz. Many of her poems take the form of monologues that make the leap from the merely annoying to the unjust, the ordinary to the cosmic as Giovanni muses over what it really means to be heroic, how science misses the point, and how age slyly puts all your mind-and soul-learning to the test. She also addresses the scandals of the times by placing "Starrism" right next to "McCarthyism," proving that it takes a poet to get it just right. ((Reviewed March 15, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)