The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde

August 1, 1997
Lorde--a recent New York State poet, author of ten books, a self-styled "black lesbian mother warrior poet," and matriarch of the North American lesbian feminist movement--has been sorely missed since her death of cancer in 1992. For readers familiar with Lorde's seminal essays in Sister Outsider (1984), this volume offers a complementary view. The poems are not easy to read in that many of them document the everyday horrors of racism and sexism, eulogizing victims who would otherwise have been forgotten, Lorde's commitment to the fight against injustice, her struggle to raise her children, and her insistence on honest communication with women and men she considered her sisters and brothers are rendered passionately and urgently throughout her oeuvre, from The First Cities, published in 1968, to her posthumous The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance (Norton, 1993). Lorde's ties that bind are those of blood and also of passion and conviction. Recommended where Lorde's work is popular.--Ina Rimpau, Newark P.L., N.J.

August 1, 1997
Since her death in 1992, Lorde's reputation has continued to grow. In life a tough, eloquent crusader who demanded that we honor the varieties of human experience, she retained her hold on readers despite the unavailability of much of her work. This edition, then, should be welcomed wherever there is interest in women's, minority, and lesbian literature. It includes Lorde's passionately private early work as well as her later, more obviously political work, bringing together such lovely, small, personal pieces as "Song" ("Strip our loving of dream / pay its secrets to thunder / and ransom me home") and longer, later works such as "Songs from the Moon of Beulah Land," with its rhetorical, oratorical fullness. The completeness of this collection (it includes multiple versions of several poems) may not serve Lorde's reputation as well as a selection might have, since there are patchy sections in her work. For her best poems--strong, vibrant, and wild--she will continue to be sought out. ((Reviewed Aug. 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)