... Here ... New and Selected Poems.

by Everett Hoagland Leapfrog Press, April 2002, $14.95 ISBN 0-967-9520-5-0

There is the habit of "taking on a text" in the black preacher tradition, where the minister selects a passage from the Good Book and imparts wisdom through ancient words before his sermon is through. Many have likened this text-taking to cultural African customs and equate the black preacher with his African counterpart, the griot.

In his second book of poetry, ... Here ... New and Selected Poems, Everett Hoagland takes African-American history as his own text, mining diverse diaspora territory from its origins to the present. As a former student of Michael S. Harper's at Brown University during the early '70s, Hoagland might be characterized as a descendent of the Black Arts Movement. He reveals this with his nods to early beat poets in "Bob Kaufman?" and "you should be shoo be: amiri baraka" and the inclusion of political poems such as "The Last Scottsboro `Boy'" and "For Joann Little," a tribute to the young political activist who stabbed her jailer for trying to rape her. As with some Black Arts poets, there is sometimes the masculine posturing of that earlier era in this second book, but Hoagland executes this with such irony that the reader is left chuckling instead of exasperated.

He establishes himself as more than a recycler of old moves and movements and Hoagland's range of craft is impressive and his risk-taking ambitious. For the most part, he is successful, creating tight, economical poems like "Pop Pop" and "Georgia on His Mind," and in much longer, performance-oriented pieces like "Goree," a moving depiction of slavery's nightmarish geography. Like the preacher's chant, there is a strut to Hoagland's poems and a didactic quality, but what makes this book a largely satisfying and complicated read is Hoagland's vulnerability as he remains true to history and politics.

--Honoree Fanonne Jeffers is the author of The Gospel of Barbecue and the forthcoming Outlandish Blues.