The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni

By Nikki Giovanni
William Morrow, $20

ISBN 0-688-14047-5

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Review by Robert Fleming

Renowned poet Nikki Giovanni is also a survivor. Recently, she underwent a successful operation for lung cancer. Unlike many of her contemporaries of the Black Power movements in the late 1960s, her work has endured to be included in a new collection, The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni. With a career lasting more than 25 years, Giovanni has continued to gain new fans of her often controversial, direct verse. Her evolving visual sense is evident in the latter poems in this illuminating, entertaining book: ". . . watching the red sun bleed/into the ocean/one thinks of the beauty that fire brings/if the eye is a camera and the film is the heart/then the photo assistant is god." A fitting tribute to a woman warrior with a rapier pen and a sensualist's vision.

Robert Fleming is a journalist in New York City