Posthumous jewels: Gwendolyn Brooks left us many rich words.

In Montgomery and Other Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks Third World Press, October 2003 $22.95, ISBN 0-883-78232-4

When a beloved artist dies I always fantasize that there is something wonderful yet to come: a manuscript that was in progress, lost or hidden letters uncovered, secreted treatises, never-published juvenilia. So what a joy to discover that Gwendolyn Brooks left us In Montgomery. The book she was completing when she passed in 2000 is a collection of epics and shorter lyric poems that affirm her place as one of the most significant and masterful poets of the 20th century. The book gathers poems published in some of her smaller press books, Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle (1989) and Children Coming Home (1991), as well as the epic poem "In the Mecca." For serious collectors of poetry, her last writings will complete any Brooks collection. But the headline news of the book is the long poem that gives it its name, "In Montgomery" which has neverbefore been published in book form.

In 1971, Herbert Nipson, Ebony magazine's executive editor at the time, commissioned Brooks to visit Montgomery, Alabama, with the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Moneta Sleet Jr. to see what was happening there following the significant events of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s. Brooks and Sleet "would have a 'planning breakfast" then we'd hit the Montgomery streets together," Brooks wrote ha the introductory note. "I would choose and chat with Montgomery citizens, pointing when sighting, and he would photograph them." The spread was published in the August 1971 special issue of Ebony, "The South Today."

Montgomery is one of those iconic sites of the Civil Rights Movement, in large part because of the yearlong bus boycotts from 1955 to 1956 that galvanized the movement and brought Martin Luther King Jr. to wider public recognition and responsibility. Montgomery is perfect Brooks terrain; she is as masterful at capturing the essence and flavor of the people of Montgomery as she has been with the equally iconic South Side of Chicago. When Brooks went to Montgomery, which she called "History City," she was an elder who had been awarded crowns and garlands aplenty for her work. The benefits of her accrued skills are in "In Montgomery," as well as her long view and perspective. In the poem's first page, Brooks addresses the question of form: "My work: to cite in semi song the meaning of Confederacy's Cradle." She called the work "poetic journalism," but it reads like poetry to me in the same way that work by her great Chicago friend and oral historian Studs Terkel (see his masterpieces Working and Race) captures the poetry of everyday speech. Brooks uses many of the same techniques of distilling the utterance of residents in a given black community as she does in a poem like "In the Mecca." So the poem "In Montgomery" reveals by default a fascinating view of Brooks's poetic process, how she mines the life around her, and with a discerning eye turns it into poetry and makes the raw material of heard speech become the gold of poetry.

In Montgomery implicitly poses questions that are "Brooksean" indeed: what are we left with "after the murder, after the burial," as she explores in her poem "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till." Which is to say, when the heroes of the movement have died down, when the movement itself has died down, how do we find the activism that keeps us alive and in struggle, together?"

"There is a need for someone to show the way',/" she writes, quoting a Montgomery resident. "A full figure. There is power in the face but the/stitches are loose." The book closes with her poem "Aurora," which echoes a familiar sentiment, an exhortation of people to rise to the occasion of their times and lives:

   We who are weak and wonderful, wicked,
   bewildered, wistful and wild
   Are saying direct Good mornings through
   the fever.
   It is the giant-hour.
   Nothing less than gianthood will do.

The poems from Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle include the marvelous "Song of Winnie," a longer poem in sections that goes into the mind of a young Winnie Mandela during the long years her husband, Nelson, spent in prison cut off from so much and she was left to uphold his image and political ideals. This was no small task for a young woman who was radicalized by her circumstances. Brooks imagines young Winnie:

   I try not to love me.
   I try to be at big remove from me; I try
   to do the good thing always because it is good.
   I try not to worship my prettiest piece of
   pottery ...
   They say of me
   "She has to fix people."
   They say of me
   "Hers
   is a large hard beauty."

The poems from Gottschalk are an eclectic blend of portraits yoked neither by race nor geography but by what empathetically calls the poet. In "Thinking of Elizabeth Steinberg," she considers a white, Jewish New York girl who was beaten to death by her stepfather in 1987; her mother did not intervene.

The spare, beautiful, heartbreaking book Children Coming Home is printed in its entirety in In Montgomery. The epigraph to the group of short lyrics comes from Brooks's friend and fellow poet Mari Evans, who expresses "Speak the truth to the people." The animating premise of the poems is "Not all of the children/come home to cookies and cocoa./Some come to crack cocaine." Each poem is in the voice of these children who bare magnificent names: Tinsel Marie, Richardine, Kojo, Ulysses, Fleur, Diego, and Superbe, to name a few. With almost uncanny simplicity, Brooks's miniature portraits give fulsome pictures of the lives and struggles of these children.

The poems from Gottschalk and Children represent the last two decades of Brooks's career that may be unknown even to some fans of her work. They cover the terrain post-Blacks, her collected works (Third World Press, 1987), and only repeat the poem "In the Mecca." Between Blacks and In Montgomery, one can have almost all of Brooks's works.

The poem "In the Mecca" was first published in the eponymous book in 1968, and this was the last book Brooks gave to Harper & Row, choosing to publish her work with black companies after that. She kept at the poem "In the Mecca" for some 30 years after working for a "spiritual adviser" named Dr. E.N. French, who sold charms and potions in the Mecca apartment building on the South Side of Chicago. It is the longest poem in her oeuvre (817 lines), composed of linked portraits. Brooks has always been a portraitist extraordinaire, and "In the Mecca" is no different in that regard from earlier poems or from the later poems in Children.

The characters in "In the Mecca" are linked through the geography of living in the apartment building at the time of a great tragedy, which unfolds as the poem progresses: One of Mrs. Sallie's children is missing. The mother searches from apartment to apartment; no one has seen the girl, most are indifferent to her entreaties, and it turns out that the girl is found murdered beneath a fellow Mecca dweller's cot. All the promise that was once the Mecca building (it was originally a showplace) is evaporated, and more importantly, this black community is shown in chaos and literal self-destruction.

I wish some of the poems from the second half of the book In The Mecca were included here because they address the business of re-building the community and pose challenging questions to the reader. How do we, to use Brooks's words from 1949, "wizard a way through our screaming weed?" I think, however, "In the Mecca" is the sole representation of that book in this collection because it makes an argument, along with "In Montgomery" and "Children Coming Home" for Brooks as an epic poet, as well as the undisputed master of the short, right lyric poem we already know her to be. "In The Mecca" evolves logically from her own poetic tableaux in the kitchenette apartments of Chicago. She goes on at epic length, as in "In Montgomery," to enter worlds for which the answers are far away and will only be reached by immersion.

In her introduction to In Montgomery, Brooks laments that one of Sleet's photographic images was lost: a "heart-stopping feature of a solitary Black boy atop a tower of golden sand, in wonderful isolation skinny arras spread in almost violent exultation, in exhilarated love of self and of the world." That is in some ways a quintessential Brooks image. She wrote about everyday people and captured the solitary space that people carve out for themselves in which to survive, meditate, dream. Within the mass her characters are individuals, and within fracas and noise her characters are looking for a little space to think and then imagine. I am not alone in missing the great and singular Gwendolyn Brooks more and more as time goes by. This book is perhaps her final and lasting gift.

Elizabeth Alexander teaches at Yale University. Her essays, The Black Interior, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in January.