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New and Selected Poems 
by Everett Hoagland

Thirty years of the best published poems by one of our finest African American Poets

Chosen By ForeWord Magazine Best Poetry Book of 2002       

With a Foreword by Martín Espada

"Everett Hoagland is a poet whose sensibility has been seasoned in the rich loam of the black folk heritage and impressively informed by the full range of the Western literary canon," says the eminent African American poet Sam Allen. "This is an important volume. This is a poetry of eloquence and challenge, rooted in the wisdom of his ancestral past and articulated with a confident mastery of his craft."

HERE is Everett Hoagland’s finest achievement, offering 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. Hoagland’s heart, his intelligence and his power of language interact in this honest and sometimes lacerating collection.

"The people crowding these poems might spring from a vast mural of African and African-American history. We see Sally Hemings, the slave mistress of Thomas Jefferson; the last of the "Scottsboro Boys;" Joann Little, a prison inmate who killed the white guard attempting to rape her; the Beat poet Bob Kaufman; jazz trumpeter Miles Davis; Winnie Mandela …the famous and the infamous … The poet's own family ghosts stare at us from the vast mural too. Everett Hoagland speaks and sings for them all. Angry, celebratory, incantatory, there is a presence in these poems that will not be denied."
—from the Foreword by Martín Espada

"Marvelous. There is in his language the ring of the Beats, Black Mountain music, consciousness streaming, and rhyming in rapper style, and there is the breath of the spoken poem, a speech that reveals a vast compassion for all the powerless."
—The American Book Review

“Hoagland’s poetry recollects what is forgotten and discovers what is lost: family “legacies,” humans sacrificed for oppression or slavery, peoples “thrown overboard.” With bebop rhythms and a visceral idiom, chantlike “drum music” informs “the grave of time,” the ocean pilgrimage from the ancestral soil of Africa to “the funky hold of America.” Outrage arises from roots of family and land and from a sense of shared suffering. Recommended for all collections.”
—Library Journal

"Everett Hoagland's is the poetry of registered experience, of sharpened perception rationalized into poetic "use" of great effectiveness. What he speaks of through ironies, delineates, derogates, praises. These are crystallized self-revelations, emotionally powered, intellectually burnished, self-possessions of a sensibility still searching for the fullest clarity of Who, What, Where, Why?
A clarity in and of the world, which, as it effloresces with each new work, beats sound-word-image like the log of a very old say-lore (griot-french) Djali, like the most ancient poets' 'Glee Club.' It's how we have raised the sun, each AM, from Osiris, through Orpheus: Douglass and DuBois and Langston and Zora and Sterling and Margaret and Jimmy and Lorraine and Henry Dumas and Them.
Or Roumain, Mikey Smith, Guillen, Neruda and Them. All Them Thems is We. One of Them Thems is Hoagland. Hoagland makes us remember to Shine. Which is our write-ful name! "
—Amiri Baraka

"Every person in the world stands in need of a poet/friend, someone who cares and someone who comprehends. Everett Hoagland is just such a poet/friend. I sure am glad he's mine."
—Maya Angelou

"The passion of Everett Hoagland's social and historical consciousness match the skill of his lyrical command and the brilliance of his imagination.That so much of his work is now reachable in one place is a blessing."
—Clarence Major

Read the Foreword by Martín Espada

Important Information About Possible Errors in Your Text!

Everett Hoagland is the winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Award as well as two Massachusetts Council Fellowships for Poetry. His poems have appeared in venues as diverse as The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Essence and The Progressive. For many years he was a professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts (North Dartmouth) and now travels widely to perform his work.

CATEGORY: Poetry
PAGES: 107
TRIM: 6 x 9
ISBN: 0-9679520-5-0
PRICE: $14.95/ Paperback Original

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