My Soul's High Song

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is a prodigious volume of work by one of the most important black writers of the 1920s and '30s, a period of intense creative activity in Afro-American literature. As exemplified by the novel One Way to Heaven , Cullen (1903-1946) was perpetually caught between the morality of the church and the hedonism of a prospering Harlem, between the noble purity of his African roots and the bourgeois blandness resulting from miscegenation. Known primarily as a lyric poet, one of Cullen's greatest influences was Keats, whose spirit can be felt in many of the poems collected here, including ``The Ballad of the Brown Girl,'' in which a lord chooses to marry a rich black girl over the poor Caucasian woman whom he truly loves; ``Heritage,'' which answers the question ` `What is Africa to me? '' ; ``The Black Christ,'' confronting the relationship between Christianity and color; and scores of others about the beauty of love and the pain of death. This is a worthy collection by a writer whose myriad views deserve the recognition that has long been lost to them. Early is the author of Tuxedo Junction: Essays Towards a Cultural Definition of America. (Jan.)

Library Journal

Cullen (1903-46), Harlem Renaissance poet and man of letters, is perhaps best known for the couplet ``Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ to make a poet black, and bid him sing.'' His poems infuse a Keatsean prosody with the existential concerns of being black, American, and Christian: ``It is a rare and tantalizing fruit/ Our hands reach for, but nothing absolute.'' Lauded by educated blacks and whites of the Twenties, Cullen's work has been neglected in recent years. This long-overdue collection expands a poetry selection released soon after his death. More poems, a novel, essays, translations, speeches, an interview by James Baldwin, notes, and more have been added by Early, whose fine introduction is a moving portrait of a man whose biography has proven elusive. Highly recommended.-- Ellen Kaufman, Dew ey Ballantine Law Lib., New York