Selected Honors for Here in Harlem include:
An ALA Best Book for Young Adults, an ALA Notable Book, Capitol Choices, Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, CCBC Choice, Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Books for Great Kids, IRA Notable Book for a Global Society, and the Claudia Lewis Award.
Publishers Weekly
In nearly 60 poems, Myers (145th Street) treats readers to a tour of Harlem's past and present, its hopes and fears, through the voices of narrators young and old. Together they create a pastiche of the community's fixtures, the church ("Wake up Lazurus! Wake up Paul!/ Wake the congregation and lift their hearts"), the barber shop for men, the hairdresser for women ("My mouth is sealed, you don't even see a crack,/ 'Cause I ain't the kind to talk behind nobody's back"), rent parties (where people gathered to eat, drink and to help the host pay the rent) and Sylvia's restaurant. "Clara Brown's Testimony," parts I-IV provides a continuity through the collected impressions, as she describes her love for Harlem, through heartbreak (when she and her sister do not make the Cotton Club chorus line, she's told it's because her skin is too dark: "That was the day I learned that being black wasn't no simple thing, even in Harlem") and more often joy. Myers offers differing perspectives on milestone events such as Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers, as well as subjects closer to home, such as young love, or a pairing of poems by a father and his drug-addict daughter. Another especially moving cluster of poems rotates among three WWII vets from the 369th Infantry, known as the "Harlem Hellfighters," one of them blinded by a Southern sheriff after the war, on their way home. And Harlem is indeed home, to all of the people who give voice to its pains and pleasures. Readers will want to visit again and again. Ages 12-up. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Barbara L. Talcroft - Children's Literature
Myers has won numerous awards for his fiction, but he has always been a poet, and in this collection he becomes a poet of Harlem, where he grew up and heard its pulsing rhythms. Inspired by the
Spoon River Anthology of Edgar Lee Masters, Myers recreates the voices of Harlem dwellers he has known—from students and poets to artists and evangelists, street vendors and veterans, nurses and party girls. The poems are loosely connected by the testimony in six parts of a fictitious Clara Brown, who adds her perspective to life in Harlem through the years ("Yes, it's done changed some, honey / And rearranged itself some / But when I was young, I danced these streets"). Of the fifty-four poems, it's impossible to pick one favorite. Readers will have to find their own, perhaps drawn to the almost unbearable poignancy of "Terry Smith, 24,
Unemployed" or the rueful cadences of "Helen Sweet, 27,
Party Girl." The accompanying photographs from Meyers' own collection are piercingly evocative, although he says they aren't chosen as illustrations of particular poems. One can only marvel at the image of Al Sharpton as a boy evangelist, for example, or at the jacket photo of Duke Ellington posing elegantly with two of his singers in 1938. Even the endpapers demand attention, with "George Ambrose, 33,
English Teacher" (Myers' lovely tribute to Yeats), superimposed on a map of Harlem. This beautifully produced volume with its vision of a vibrant and beloved community is outstanding in every way. 2004, Holiday House, Ages all.
No comments:
Post a Comment