Robert HaydenCollected Poems

ROBERT HAYDEN (1913-1980) was the first African-American to be appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now titled the U.S. Poet Laureate. He won numerous prizes and awards during the last decade of his life, including the 1975 Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for "distinguished poetic achievement." Hayden stands out among Twentieth Century American, poets not just for his many literary accomplishments, but for the strong vision of faith that illuminates so much of his work.In addition to well known poems such as "Those Winter Sundays" and "The Whipping," this anthology contains other equally stirring poems including "Aunt Jemima Of The Ocean Waves" which depicts a conversation with the fat woman from a Coney Island side-show and "Belsen, Day Of Liberation" dedicated to Rosey Pool, the Dutch teacher of Anne Frank and first translator of her famous diary.While Hayden writes much about African-American history and culture, his poems do not tell the reader what to think or feel. Instead, his carefully crafted verse weaves images that allow the careful reader to move around in some very unusual territory, some beautiful, some uncomfortable. Hayden puts us in the mind of the oppressor in poems like "Middle Passage" about the famous Amistad incident, and "Night, Death, Mississippi" where we eavesdrop on an old Klan member too frail to attend a lynching with his son, of whom he is proud. "Be there with Boy and the rest / if I was well again. / Time was. Time was. / White robes like moonlight / In the sweetgum dark."Hayden can also be wickedly funny. In "American Journal" written a few years before his death, his narrator is a spy from a distant planet in the galaxy who reports back to his fellow superiors about "this baffling multi people extremes and variegations their noise restlessness their almost frightening energy."In addition to poems about childhood, society, and race, Hayden also writes about the history and central figures of his religion, the Bahá'í Faith. In "Baha' u'llah In The Garden Of Ridwan" he compares the founder of Bahá'í at an important juncture to Christ the night before being crucified w ho prayed to be relieved of his great destiny. In "Dawnbreaker" Hayden describes the torture of one early Bahá'í put to death by having candles of oil and wick lit within his skin. "Ablaze / with candles sconced / in weeping eyes / of wounds."Despite his numerous awards, Hayden was not well known to many poetry readers until the end of his life. Fortunately, his reputation has increased since Collected Poems was published posthumously. If you are interested in rich, well crafted poetry which explores what it means to be human, try Hayden. As Aunt Jemima says in the above mentioned poem, "And that's the beauty part, I mean, ain't that the beauty part."

. . . and you will always know where you stand with Robert Hayden. His work is a treasure forever.Some poems feel timeless like Greek or African legends. Others have a solid rhythm that reminds me of the strong, secure beat of poems my high school teachers wanted us to remember as exemplary work--and they were serious teachers forty years ago. Many of Hayden’s poems are strongly narrative with story-telling qualities that offer enough action for a short novel. Hayden convinces me that we, today, can feel the experiences of people who lived 250 years ago. Even if you know that “black lives matter,” and you have seen the television reports with the demonstrations and speeches, Hayden, with just a few pen strokes gives the feel and sensation of black lives mattering:“When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful / and terrible thing, needful to man as air, / . . . . this Douglass, this former slave, . . . visioning a world / . . . shall be remembered. . . / not with legends and poems . . . / but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives / fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing” (pg 62).Hayden was also a visionary. He had the audacity of natural innocence to let himself dream:“I cross the boardwalk to the beach, / lie in the sand and gaze beyond / the clutter at the sea. / . . . Trouble you for a light? / I turn as Aunt Jemima settles down / beside me, her blue-rinsed hair / without the red bandanna now” (pg 72-73).At times, Hayden writes poems in the tones of elegy for Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X. Hayden is also a shape-shifter, a gender-bender projecting himself into the world using the voices of historic figures such as Phillis Wheatley, “London, 1773”:“O Sable Muse!” the Countess cried, / embracing me, when I had done. / I held back tears, as is my wont, / . . . At supper--I dined apart / like captive Royalty-- / the Countess and her Guests promised / signatures affirming me / True Poetess, albeit once a slave. / . . . Alas, there is no Eden without its Serpent” (pg 147).My one regret is that the publisher of Hayden’s _Collected Poems_ did not use a paper of better strength than newsprint; this collection deserves to be printed on quality paper.