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New and Selected Poems
by Everett Hoagland
With a Foreword by Martín Espada
Thirty years of the best published poems by
one of our finest African American Poets
Chosen By ForeWord Magazine Best Poetry Book of 2002
"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 (March/April, 2003)
“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
—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. He is a professor of literature at the University of
Massachusetts (North Dartmouth) and travels widely to perform his work.
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CATEGORY: Poetry
PAGES: 107
TRIM: 6 x 9
ISBN: 0-9679520-5-0
PRICE: $14.95/ Paperback Original
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