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Title: Complete Poems (The American Poetry Recovery Series) by Claude McKay, William J. Maxwell ISBN: 0-252-02882-1 Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr (Pro Ref) Pub. Date: March, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.95

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Summary: McKay's Complete Poems: A Historic Event
Comment: Most readers will probably be aware of McKay's 1919 poem "If We Must Die," accurately recognized in anthologies of African American literature as the first openly defiant black insurgent lyric during the racial violence of the post-Great War period. Edited and introduced by William Maxwell, author of New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (1999), this new collection of more than three hundred of McKay's poems-including nearly a hundred published for the first time-provides an entirely new understanding of the diaspora-trotting author's verse, from his "dialect" poetry published in Jamaica during the early teens to McKay's somewhat misleadingly titled "Right Turn To Catholicism" writings during the mid-forties.

Most striking are "The Years Between," as Maxwell describes McKay's verse from the twenties to the mid-thirties. During this fifteen-year stretch, McKay's lyrics versify the historical intersections between the Harlem Renaissance, modernist period leftism, anticolonial transnationalist negritude, and bohemian queer (...) ardor. Critics have regularly portrayed McKay as the first black intellectual to recant his Communism-and his repudiation is supposed to have taken place during the early 1920s. One startling fact that Maxwell's impressive scholarship illustrates is McKay's lyrical dedication to the international proletariat and Soviet State throughout not only the twenties but even into the thirties. Readers should find it illuminating, moreover, that McKay's praises to Communism are tangled up with an emergent African liberation struggle poetry and the advent of a black same-(...) love lyricism.

What's more, this edition annotates McKay's fascinating, generally unknown poetry clusters: the verse chronicle of his hospitalization during the early twenties that he referred to as "The Clinic"; the thirties' paeans to the "Cities" he inhabited; and the Catholic-inspired poems of the forties he called "The Cycle." To say that Maxwell's one-hundred-and-ten pages of annotations is thorough does not begin to express how valuable this collection is to various reading communities, including readers of poetry by black diaspora authors, verse by writers of the Left, writings by progressive-minded Catholic authors, and poetry by (...)queer voices. The appearance of Claude McKay's Complete Poems is indeed a historic event.