Here: New and Selected Poems

Author: Everett Hoagland 

Publisher: Leapfrog Press (2002)

Everett Hoagland is a poet of witness. Esteemed by the African-American community for blending language with musical form through sound, image, and rhythm, his poetry is a passionate examination of history, which allows us to neither look away nor forget.

Every Fourth of July I want some country, some-one to send a replica of one of all those slave ships over the Middle Passage to the tall ship parade-To keep it honest, to make it real, to see. First published by the historic Broadside Press, Hoagland now offers us thirty years of his best published poems plus a collection of stunning new work.

The temperature of these poems is high, sometimes radiantly warm and loving, sometimes scalding with a sense of justice and injustice. But Hoagland's range is wide. He digs for the poetry in his subjects, never resting in rhetoric but passing through it into something finer and deeper. He writes about Africa; about friendship and fatherhood; about New England, his adopted home; about historical figures who live in his mind and his blood. From Sally Hemings to Winnie Mandela to Amiri Baraka; from his daughter's birth to the outrage of clitoridectomy, Hoagland's heart, his intelligence and his power of language interact in this honest and sometimes lacerating collection.