In the Mecca : poems
- Date:
- [1968]
- Author:
- Brooks, Gwendolyn, 1917-2000, author.
- Collecting Area:
- Rare Books
- Call Number:
- PS 3503 R7244 I5X 1968 LOCAL
- Publisher:
- Harper & Row
- ISBN:
- 0060105372
- Abstract:
- This was the Pulitzer Prize-winner's first new collection of poetry after a gap of nearly ten years. "I was to be a Watchful Eye; a Tuned Ear; a Super-reporter," Brooks said. "I began writing about whatever I thought I knew, whatever I experienced." What she knew and experienced in those years resulted in poetry charged with a new power and urgency. The book takes its title from a long narrative poem set in a huge decayed apartment house in Chicago's black ghetto, a building called the Mecca. A tragedy in the Mecca gives rise to Brooks' extraordinary poetic evocation of its dense personal miseries and sense of life. Nine shorter poems follow, and these too, in large part, have their source in contemporary figures and circumstances: Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, "the Blackstone Rangers gang," the astonishing prideful mural painted on a ghetto wall one summer. The universality that transcends the immediate event, and is the mark of poetic sensibility, distinguishes all the poetry here. Gwendolyn Brooks' stature as a poet who "induces almost unbearable excitement"--As Phyllis McGinley described her--is here enriched by the new dimensions her work encompasses.--Adapted from book jacket.
- Physical Description:
- vii, 54 pages ; 22 cm
- Series:
- Title.
- Notes:
- Special Collections copy has dust jacket. LOCAL
- Subjects:
- African Americans Poetry, African American women Poetry, African American families Poetry, Missing children Poetry, Inner cities Illinois Chicago Poetry, African Americans Poetry, African American families, African American women, African Americans, Inner cities, and Missing children
- Genres/Forms:
- Novels in verse, Novels in verse, Poetry, Novels in verse. lcgft, and Poetry. lcgft
- Names:
- X, Malcolm, 1925-1965 Poetry and X, Malcolm, 1925-1965
- Corporate Names:
- Black Stone Rangers (Street gang) Poetry and Black Stone Rangers (Street gang)
- Topics:
- LOCAL and LOCAL
- Geographic Terms:
- Illinois Chicago
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