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BOOK REVIEW                               DENT

i live in vieux carre
the old quarter of the french
where the blacks line the narrow arcades
drinking regal beer

they await the late
  marie  laveau  the vodun queen
                     to come on in
but the train from congo square
                 is lost

which uses images to tell a hilarious albeit tragic story which on the deepest level is historically and psychologically true. And yes, he more than any comparable blk poet writing today is urban; the Big Apple pervades all his images no matter where he is. That is, the spirit of the Big Apple, the cynicism of the same Apple, and a hell of a lot of the mysticism that lower east side poets, white and black, developed in the sixties to deal with the insensitivity of the Apple.
  What we have come to think of as black poetry has become too constricted, and just lately so. There's no question that David's perception is suffused with the black experience, but if he forced a wooden ideological consciousness on himself he would ruin his work. There simply must be room for the black writer with an intensely personal vision to go on his own aesthetic antennas.
  Possibly David is not conscious of writing for black readers, but his work is certainly something black people can use, and not just for now. There are times when he can't put it all together. But when David is turned on and his images are forged with imaginative power he is a true blk historian/prophet. He can give us what only a few of our writers can, he can make us see it and feel it, and all the black ideologues from the pacific to the atlantic can't touch that.

Tom Dent


THE HIDDEN POET

CATHEDRAL IN THE GHETTO AND OTHER POEMS. By Octave Lilly, Jr. 
  Vantage Press Inc., New York. xii; 96 pages. $3.75.

Though very different from David Henderson, the work of New Orleans poet Octave Lilly also represents a too often neglected

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