2013 is the centenary of African-American poet Robert Hayden's birth. Hayden, who once said he wanted to be a black poet "the way Yeats is an Irish poet," was the first African American to serve as poet laureate of the United States. He was born Asa Bundy Sheffey, but his mother, struggling in Detroit poverty, gave the infant boy to the Haydens; he never knew he was a foster child until he was 40. Slight and very poor of sight, he was ostracized by his classmates. At the University of Michigan, he studied with W. H. Auden, who gave him inspiration and direction as he moved away from his earlier radical socialist politics to pursue a poetry that Arnold Rampersand describes in an afterword to these Collected Poems as "saturated in nationalistic lore and love," while still maintaining his "independence of vision."
This collection highlights such stellar pieces as his powerful meditation on slavery, "Middle Passage":
A charnel stench, effluvium of living death
spreads outward from the hold
where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,
lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.
And "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz," his elegy on Malcolm X:
He fell upon his face before
Allah the raceless in whose blazing Oneness all
were one. He rose renewed renamed, became
much more than there was time for him to be. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher