Maya Angelou The Complete Collected Poems.
Random House, 273 pages, $23
When Maya Angelou, the poet laureate, read at the Clinton Inauguration, it was the first time a poet had done so since Robert Frost recited his poems at the Kennedy Inauguration over thirty years before. How times—and poets—have changed! If Frost was a national symbol misunderstood by a good many of his readers—he was not the genial celebrator of farm life he was made out to be—Maya Angelou is a national symbol quite fully comprehended, thank you very much, by her vast legion of admirers. What, after all, can possibly be misconstrued in the wish, as stated recently by Angelou on a television show, to “try … to find the likeness in us all”? What is there to misread in sentiments such as “In minor ways we differ,/ in major we’re the same,” sentiments which are never balanced by even the slightest contrary perception?
Whether chastising racist America (“the naked/ Black-White truth,” as she calls it) or romanticizing distant Africa, there isn’t a trace of an unexpected thought or feeling, never a hint of a vision beyond the clichés that now usually rule when anyone, black or white, discusses the issue of black identity. Not that Angelou refuses to criticize blacks; she does, but in an exceptionally odd manner, namely, by laying almost all the blame on black men—the junkies, wife-beaters, and child-abusers who inhabit the ghetto. Just about every woman of color, at least