Adjacency can have a downside when it sparks comparison. “Praise Song for Annie Allen” by Angela Jackson is published alongside Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Memorial to Ed Bland” in Poetry, September 2024. The juxtaposition drives home for me how brightly Brooks shines as a writer.

Jackson’s “Praise Song” pays respect to Brooks’s second volume of poetry titled Annie Allen. The tribute has movement familiarly endearing like that, say, of a butterfly.

Before you
There was none so high
Minded,
So elegantly eloquent.
You were high standing
Fruit.
[…]

“Elegantly eloquent” is adverb heavy, but the text stays airborne. Showy enjambments with “minded” and “fruit” are their own reward. The tribute has a deft enough ring to it; it just happens to sit opposite a text that beats wing like a windhover. 

Brooks eulogizes a fellow Chicago poet named Ed Bland killed in WWII. Her poem leads with italicized fact, as from a clipped obit: … killed in Germany March 20, 1945; / volunteered for special dangerous mission / … wanted to see action…

Her entry point has outrageous daring:

He grew up being curious
And thinking things are various.
Nothing was merely deleterious
Or spurious.
[…]

It takes brass to elicit buy-in on the deadpan rhyming of a litany of Latinate words which conjointly nail a vast dimension of her subject’s character. The youth she knew was perceptive and connective and intuitive; he had an expansive, reflecting mind. All of that gets established in four lines memorably and with impudence. The spunky emphasis conveyed by the clipped, two-word finale of the stanza previews the knack for straight-ahead rhythm and phrasing that juices the poem’s unsentimental tenderness.

I feel I’ve already said too much. The practice of commenting on poetry is heartbreaking, and notoriously spurious; heartbreaking because you have to leave out most of what you want to say — you can’t quote the whole damn poem waxing rhapsodic at every turn; spurious because commentary devours readerly bandwidth which in all likelihood is better invested in the poem itself. 

I’ll quote only the second stanza, then, and try to conclude quickly.

Or good.
HIs mother could
Not keep him from a popping-eyed surprise
At things. He would
Be digging everywhere until things gave.
Or did not give. Among his dusty ruins,
Suddenly there’d be his face to see,
And its queer, wonderful expression, salted
With this cool, twirling awe.
[…]

What resonates for me is the the early blush of a raging curiosity, a young sojourner’s unselfconscious demonstrativeness over the gains and setbacks of discovery. The language is eventful, unpredictable; it crackles and throws sparks. I have to exclaim how Brooks’s use of the verb “give” in this passage is straight from the beating heart of American vernacular, or at least from the dialect that raised me. When something “gives,” it cedes to probing, shows itself truly, reveals a bit of essence. A conundrum, in giving, yields ground to a curious young man’s unyielding gaze. Sometimes.

Death is a topic on which people are willing to let poetry have a say — mostly they’re too busy for it. What Auden wrote on the occasion of Yeats’s death is gold standard in the genre. Gwendolyn Brooks’s elegy is from the same vein.

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