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FREEDOMWAYS     FOURTH QUARTER 1972

aspect of contemporary black writing in America. Mr. Lilly is a man who has fashioned an impressive career in a historic black insurance company in Louisiana, but despite the fact that a career as writer was something not possible for him, he has maintained an amazingly alive and keen perception of the life that he has seen in some sixty-odd years. And though Mr. Lilly does not write in contemporary black language, but the language of formal English poetry he was taught, what comes through is the thinking and feeling black man who always deals with essences, and he manages to do this with rare grace and elegance. Somehow we must look past the surface matter of language dress and see if our writers are telling us something of importance.

The subject matter of Mr. Lilly's work is the great themes of our people: integration, black awareness, M. L. King, black power, segregation, slave revolts, etc., and many personal poems to friends. It is no secret that Mr. Lilly believes in the dream of America's potential:
black power
* * *
means for me
no separate nation
of black folk within a nation
melded of
black, yellow, brown, red and white immigrants....
a dream I for one long ago discarded as a hoax, but I dig the fact that he sticks to his guns. After all, Mr. Lilly reflects the aspirations and hopes of his generation-and my generation has to understand (and accept) him on his own terms if we are to understand and accept our cynicism about America.

Octave Lilly represents the best of his generation-the hidden poet in al of us, they poets our people have always but too rarely in print been. I think of him in the same terms as he conceives to honor a great New Orleans black physician:

A golden thread your life and works have been;
and serving needles that have mended well,
the thread has sutured wounds of every sheen
-and lasted strong and sure.

Tom Dent

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