Book review:
Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance
by Nikki Grimes
Pub Date: 05 Jan 2021
Read Courtesy of http://netgalley.com
As an intriguing exercise in poetry, this volume hits the mark. I can't wait to show it to the teacher in my school who teaches poetry and runs the poetry club. Nikki's use of the "Golden Shovel" technique of writing poems using words from others' poems is something that will feel very accessible to our high school students. That being said, Nikki described the Golden Shovel technique as using each word chosen from one line of another's poem as the last word in a line of original poetry; it doesn't look like Nikki followed her own definition -- although it could be that by reading the book on a Kindle, I couldn't properly see the line breaks.
Regardless, introducing or reintroducing the poems of these women from the Harlem Renaissance is worth the publication in itself. Add Nikki's additions, and we benefit from time and perspective, culture and experience.
My intention of providing the next part of my review in a somewhat interpretive way is not to sway your own opinions of the poetry itself, but instead to provide the way I interpreted the collection as a teaching tool as much as a book of poetry. My favorite poem was Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "I Sit and Sew." It feels very "of a time." Nikki's corresponding poem, "Room for Dreams," makes for an interesting comparison of the culture of a time. I felt the same parallel of a universal theme moving across time with Clarissa Scott Delany's "Joy" and Nikki's Leah's "Reunion." On the other hand, I perceived the pairing of Gertrude Parthenia McBrown's "Jehovah's Gesture" as an opposite to Nikki's "Judgment." Nikki even says in the introduction that her challenge was to make sense of and not just be derivative of the original poet's words. There are a few poem pairs that are a bit too similar, but is that really a problem? A shared experience doesn't lessen the experience for any individual. Plus, it's as interesting to see the similarities of culture in spite of the passing of time as it is to experience the opposites that arise from the same words used in different ways.
One of the beautiful poems included in this collection is Effie Lee Newsome's "The Bronze Legacy (to a Brown Boy)." In this case, Nikki's corresponding poem did not augment or improve upon the original one. I felt the same about "Prelude" by Lucy Ariel Williams; Nikki's "Slow Burn" felt too derivative.
Given the modern push toward PC language, I found "Advice" by Gwendolyn Bennett and Nikki's "Brown Poems" to reveal the irony of either choosing pale words to write dark poems or using the brown way of saying what the pale one said. That, and the push for PC isn't so modern.
Structurally, I understand why this would first be a book of poetry and then a contextual history volume. However, for many of us, the poems out-of-context from the poet leave gaps in the ability to relate, interpret, or visualize the context of the poem. To that I'd suggest introducing each poem set with the biography of the poet rather than grouping the biographies at the end. Including the index is a real plus for making this book a useful teaching tool.
This is 4 ⭐ as a teaching tool, 3 ⭐ as a book of poetry.
