Addressing the literature and culture of black America, This Is My Century , a classic first published in 1989, marked a significant contribution to American Poetry, bringing together Walker's selection of one hundred of her own poems.
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Addressing the literature and culture of black America, This Is My Century , a classic first published in 1989, marked a significant contribution to American Poetry, bringing together Walker's selection of one hundred of her own poems.
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I was looking for an author new to me to read for Black History Month and found Margaret Walker's "For My People" at the local library. In 1941, Walker (1915 - 1998) became the first African American to receive the Yale Series of Younger Poets award for her book which was published with an enthusiastic Foreword by Steven Vincent Benet, a poet and the judge of the competition for that year. Yale University Press reissued the book in facsimile form in 1919. I loved the book and wanted to read more of Walker's poetry. Thus, I found this volume of collected poems, "This is My Century: New and Collected Poems" (1989) edited by Walker herself.
Walker was born in Montgomery, Alabama, lived for a time as a writer in Chicago, and earned a PhD from the University of Iowa. She lived and taught in Jackson, Mississippi for much of her life. She wrote a famous novel, "Jubilee" in addition to her poems and essays.
"For My People" is the volume of poetry for which Walker will best be remembered. The book, in particular the first part, is broad-themed and speaks movingly of the condition of African Americans and of their quest for human dignity. In the title poem, Walker wrote:
"Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth: let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and out blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control."
Although Walker continued to write poetry, she did not publish another volume until 1970. Her collection "Prophets for a New Day" consists of poems about events from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, including poems about sit-ins, demonstrations and arrests, the March on Washington, and a sonnet on the death of Malcolm X. As does Walker's poetry on the whole, many of the works in the collection use Biblical themes and figures.
The thirteen poems Walker collected under the title "October Journey" also include historical themes but they are more personal in character. The beautiful title poem describes a train journey Walker took to her Southern home and captures the ambiguities of her love for the South and of its racism. The lengthy autobiographical poem "Epitaph for my Father" tells of her father's goodness, love of books, and influence on the poet. It is one of her best poems. Other poems pay tribute to earlier African American poets including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Phillis Wheatley, and Walker's friend from her years in Chicago, Gwendolyn Brooks.
Walker assembled the poems in the title section of this book, "This is my Century" for this edition of her collected poems. The poems offer a broad historical look at the 20th Century, in its promise and in its ills. Walker writes about figures including Freud, Einstein, and Marx, and Kierkegaard as setting the tone for the century, in addition to writing about African American history. Many of the poems in this collection are meditative and personal, as well as historical, including a poem to her husband, "Love Song for Alex, 1979".
The final group of five poems "Farish Street" was written at the request of a friend to commemorate the famed African American business district in Jackson, which is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. These five poems are among Walker's best in capturing a sense of place, with the difficulties of black life and with a resilient hope for the future. The final poem "The Labyrinth of Life" offers a mystical sense of unity and of hope for the future through the poet's meditation on Farish Street. It offers a summation of Walker's work and her themes. Here is the poem.
"I have come through the maze and the mystery of living
to this miraculous place of meaning
finding all things less than vanity
all values overlaid and blessed with truth and love and peace
having a small child's hand to touch
a kiss to give across a wide abyss
and knowing magic of reconciliation and hope;
To a place blessed with smiling
Shining beyond the brightness of noonday
and I lift my voice above a rising wind
to say I care
because I now declare
this place called Farish Street in sacred memory
to be one slice of life
one wheel of fortune a turning in the wind
and as I go
a traveller through this labyrinth
I taste the bitter sweet waters of Mara
and I look to the glory of the meaning of all life
AMEN. I say AMEN."
I was moved by the poetry of Margaret Walker and was glad to discover her poems to celebrate Black History Month.
