In “Surveillance,” “Baby West” and “I Married My Mother,” she looks back on her childhood, and particularly her troubled family relationships, with a refusal to either idealize or condemn and in “Rita Dove” she looks forward to the next generation with enduring hope. In poems like “Heritage” and “If I Have to Hospital,” she considers old age with refreshing equanimity. The poems in this collection reveal Giovanni’s thematic obsessions, many of which revolve around time, memory and age. If anything, her choice to write about seemingly quotidien subjects reveals an admirable lack of self-consciousness that comes from her wealth of experience. It would be a mistake to confuse her preference for simple, everyday subjects with an inability to cope with complexity and ambiguity Giovanni is able to sit comfortably at the midline between light and dark, hope and hopelessness. These poems are saved, however, by Giovanni’s enduring earnestness, her affection for the subjects shining through in every word. For example, the acrostic “A Poem for Morris” and the prose poem “A Poem for Joanne” say nothing that hasn’t been said before by other writers in more nuanced ways.

The emotional backbone of this collection, in both its lightest and darkest moments, is Giovanni’s complete sincerity, and this makes each poem, no matter how simple, vibrate with honesty.Īt times, the poems might falter in the direction of being too simple. Poems like “Bread,” “Thirst” and “Morning Breakfast Routines” elevate the mundane pleasures of food and drink to a dream-like state of poetry, and “On a Snowy Day” is an ode to the impact of small acts of kindness from strangers. At her best, she revels in simplicity: Simple language and images thoughtfully bundled together to express great complexity and intensity of feeling.

The poems in “A Good Cry” are written in Giovanni’s signature style, combining the lyrical with the endearingly colloquial.

As one of America’s most prolific and recognizable living poets, this new collection proves that Giovanni is settling into her role as senior poet with grace, elegance and a continued immediacy that makes her work as relevant today as it was in the 1960s and ’70s. “A Good Cry” is Nikki Giovanni’s 21st collection of poems to be published, and the experience shows.

Nikki giovanni poems a good cry