In the Mecca : poems / by Gwendolyn Brooks.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brooks, Gwendolyn, 1917-2000, author.

Series:

Title.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

X, Malcolm, 1925-1965--Poetry.

X, Malcolm.

X, Malcolm, 1925-1965.

Black Stone Rangers (Street gang)--Poetry.

Black Stone Rangers (Street gang).

African Americans--Poetry.

African Americans.

Inner cities.

Missing children.

African American families.

Illinois--Chicago.

African American women--Poetry.

African American women.

African American families--Poetry.

Missing children--Poetry.

Inner cities--Illinois--Chicago--Poetry.

Genre:

Poetry.

Novels in verse.

Penn Provenance:

Lask, Thomas (donor) (RBC copy)

Physical Description:

vii, 54 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Harper & Row, [1968]

Summary:

This was the Pulitzer Prize-winner's first new collection of poetry after a gap of nearly ten years. "I was to be a Watchful Eye; a Tuned Ear; a Super-reporter," Brooks said. "I began writing about whatever I thought I knew, whatever I experienced." What she knew and experienced in those years resulted in poetry charged with a new power and urgency. The book takes its title from a long narrative poem set in a huge decayed apartment house in Chicago's black ghetto, a building called the Mecca. A tragedy in the Mecca gives rise to Brooks' extraordinary poetic evocation of its dense personal miseries and sense of life. Nine shorter poems follow, and these too, in large part, have their source in contemporary figures and circumstances: Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, "the Blackstone Rangers gang," the astonishing prideful mural painted on a ghetto wall one summer. The universality that transcends the immediate event, and is the mark of poetic sensibility, distinguishes all the poetry here. Gwendolyn Brooks' stature as a poet who "induces almost unbearable excitement"--As Phyllis McGinley described her--is here enriched by the new dimensions her work encompasses.--Adapted from book jacket.

Contents:

In the Mecca

After the Mecca. To a winter squirrel ; Boy breaking glass ; Medgar Evers ; Malcolm X.

Two dedications. I. The Chicago Picasso ; II. The wall.

The Blackstone Rangers. I. As seen by disciplines ; II. The leaders ; III. Gang girls.

The sermon on the warpland.

The second sermon on the warpland.

Notes:

Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards - Fiction, Winner, 1969

Other Format:

Online version: Brooks, Gwendolyn, 1917-2000. In the Mecca.

ISBN:

0060105372

9780060105372

OCLC:

279965