Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems

From Library Journal 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 poemsAwhich is more than enough.ALouis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews The much-published Giovanni has been amply rewarded for a career thats been spotty to say the least. Unlike fellow doggerelist Maya Angelou, Giovanni has no prose works of distinctionher Racism 101 (1994) hardly measures up to Angelous moving memoirs. So her reputation rests largely with her poetry, which, given this latest volume, is a sad spectacle: a lazy collection of prose rants with lots of ellipses to disguise the scatter-brained thinking. Her litanies of racist episodes from history, her ghetto-thug affectations, and her Oprahesque bits of uplift are all tired rhetorical devices and rely on a vocabulary of pop journalism and advertising (No problem / No Sweat / Just Jazz). Things turn so embarrassingly strange here that Giovanni mentions five or so times her personal animus toward a real-estate developer in her hometown who threatens the view from her backyard. A typical stream-of- consciousness bit links Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, black holes in science, and Sally Hemmings. Another celebrates the author and other revolutionary poets for understanding the power of a poem, with asides on the Nation of Islam and dietary habits. Giovannis political views become seriously discomfiting when her peroration on civil rights devolves into a chilling prescription for utopia. Elsewhere, she defends the presidential penis and offensively attacks anti-rap crusader C Delores Tucker . . . fuck her fuck her fuck her. Despite the infantile politics, Giovanni includes many short and light ditties, with their schoolgirl rhymes, that suggest her one strength: simple childrens verse that jumps and jives. --