The Language of Saxophones: Selected Poems of Kamau Daaood.

The Language of Saxophones: Selected Poems of Kamau Daaood City Lights Publishers, April 2005 $10.95, ISBN 0-872-86441-3

This book, a 35-year sampling of the writer's work, sings the mournful, joyful songs of life sustained between have and have-not.

The poems in Daaood's first suite cover the years 1970 through 1979. This work is reminiscent of someone learning to play an instrument. The rhythm is uneven, slowed by the length of the poems. But, he compels us through image to examine ourselves as oppressor, victim, warrior and bystander.

In the next two suites, 1980 through 1999, his focus shifts, and we are in the middle of a battleground. Here, warrior, enemy and music converge, and one easily accepts that "John Cokrane was a freedom fighter" that Billie Holiday spoke "in tongues of royal chanters,' We see snippets of survival both on and off stage; we taste the sourness of internal and external battles that must be absorbed by the body in order to keep breathing. By the end we are, like the wounded warriors, exhausted by struggle and loss.

Finally, Daaood pulls us into a new century with poems that take a vertical drop into the uncomfortable familial relationships and the emotions seldom acknowledged, except at the grave in moments of regret. He unearths our inability to voice love for a dying parent, our reluctance to fully disclose the bittersweet details of life to younger generations, and our silence when confronted with the issue of incest. He leaves us pondering the crushing solitude of these all too common experiences.

--Reviewed by E.J. Antonio E.J. Antonio is a founding member of the Poetry Caravan in Westchester City, New York. She has work forthcoming in Terra Incognita Mystery, science fiction, vampires, a Western and love--this season's novels have everything.