I would compare James Baldwin’s poetry to a finely aged single malt whiskey—a single word or phrase worth lingering over, savoring for minutes at a time as the tastes slowly unfold, filling the mouth with waves of sensation as the liquid fire descends to the stomach and then radiates heat throughout the body.
But with essays like The Fire Next Time and No Name In The Street, and novels like Go Tell It On The Mountain and Giovanni’s Room already so densely packed with ideas, emotions, characters and insights that a connoisseur’s dream like the Glenlivet 21 year old is, by comparison, a tepid glass of tap water, analogies fail to capture the beauty, the power and the breathtaking grace of Baldwin’s poetry in Jimmy’s Blues And Other Poems.
This collection, with a superb introduction by Nikky Finney, is especially welcome because Jimmy’s Blues, Baldwin’s only published poetry collection had been out of print for years. The remaining poems come from Gypsy, a limited edition, privately printed collection published shortly after Baldwin’s death.
“Time is not money.
Time
is
time.
And the time has come, again,
to outwit and outlast
survive and surmount
the authors of the blasphemy
of our chains.”
This excerpt from “Song (for Skip)” is just one of scores of verses in this slim (94 pp.) volume that has the power to pull the reader up short: stunned, humbled, perhaps eventually inspired by the prophetic boldness, the revolutionary patience, the deep musical grooves, and the irreducible, diamond-hard truth of Baldwin’s words.
In the end, what greater gift can a writer offer?
Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com