Minor Casualties.

Reviewed by E. Ethelbert Miller Howard University 

There are a number of African American intellectuals whose scholarly work at times overshadows their creative talent. One thinks immediately of Houston Baker, Jr., Jerry Ward, Jr., and bell hooks. The name Robert Chrisman is usually associated with Black Scholar magazine and such books as Contemporary Black Thought and Pan-Africanism, which are compilations of material previously published in the intellectual journal.

Chrisman's first collection of verse, Children of Empire, was published in 1981 by The Black Scholar Press, and his link to the press probably made the book appear to be a vanity press product. This is unfortunate, since Robert Chrisman is a poet worthy of praise and wider recognition. One is grateful for Naomi Long Madgett's Lotus Press for publishing Minor Casualties, a collection of twenty-nine poems divided into three sections, and containing eight poems from Children of Empire.

The work captures the sentiments of an African American intellectual at mid-life, assessing past political struggles and world changes:

It's changed these days. I walk a lot, I ration water, measure my telephone calls, Restrain my coffee use, wear sweaters And reduce the wattage of my lights. Angola, Cuba, Viet Nam are brilliant now, The song, the drum, the flute of freedom Bright as a whistle in the wind....

Minor Casualties is also a book of personal moments. "At Maya and Paul's" and "Visions" are two poems that embrace friendship and family. These poems provide a nice balance to a collection that in many places becomes overburdened by the author's tendency to write with too much "seasoning." There are many places where specific lines burn the tongue, and the poems lack smoothness and rhythm.

Chrisman's work is not infused with the popular use of blues or jazz riffs; instead, it has a more Western and "classical" tone that links him to a writer like Melvin Tolson instead of Langston Hughes or Amiri Baraka.

One of the best written stanzas in Minor Casualties can be found in "Philoctetes," the friend of Heracles:

Perhaps it was the god Or the vanished Heracles Or even the quiet songs the bow Sang to him as he slept, But one morning he ran to the white sands Where Odysseus was waiting, The crafted engine of his fate Honed and ready in his hands.

The title-poem of the collection is a disappointment. Chrisman contrasts the death of bugs, beetles, and small animals in "Minor Casualties" with black casualties in urban areas such as Philadelphia and New York, and is neither emotionally moving nor profound in terms of its sociological analysis.

The last section of Minor Casualties contains a number of love poems by Chrisman that contain an abundance of lines which come across as stiff and unromantic. Here is the opening line to "Fugata": "You exploded into me like a burst of doves." Robert Chrisman is a better writer when he is thinking about the political problems of this world. His "Canto Che" is perhaps his own song:

We do not tremble, who are small and dark, When the black lion moves among us For we are one with the shadow, One with that lion who stalks in the night And troubles the sleep of oppression.

Minor Casualties is evidence that the African American intellectual continues to find his or her voice in many genres. Poetry is so vital to our survival. Chrisman helps to keep an important tradition alive.