Words Need Love Too

Poetry. African American Studies. Kamau Brathwaite was born in Barbados in 1930, and found a rootedness in Africa that would sharpen his sense of “wholeness” and shape his awareness. His published works have surged his international standing, but since MIDDLEPASSAGES (1992, also available from SPD), the literary world has seemingly been expecting another major volume of poetry from him. WORDS NEED LOVE TOO represents that long awaited collection, and is, perhaps, Brathwaite’s most concentrated effort at fashioning a new literary tradition out of the fragmented pieces/rhythms/nation languages that form the New World. The poems in this volume are “dreamstories.” It is a harvest of dreams of a new word, cleansed in ancestral blood, loved without reservation by those born into it and with it, so that through it, they can shape a new reality, a new destiny. No other poet, living or dead, makes us participants in, and co-celebrants of, the liturgy of the word like Brathwaite.