UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Verner D. Mitchell

Collected writings by a vibrant voice of the Harlem Renaissance

This volume brings together much of the poetry and a selection of correspondence by an enormously talented but underappreciated poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Cousin of novelist Dorothy West and friend of Zora Neale Hurston, Helene Johnson (1905–1995) first gained literary prominence when James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost selected three of her poems for prizes in a 1926 competition. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, her poetry appeared in various small magazines. In 1933 she married, and two years later her last published poem appeared in Challenge, the journal West had founded to revive the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance.

"It is with great pleasure and a true sense of mission that editor Mitchell presents the first complete collection of Johnson's work, an exhilarating interpretive volume put together with the help of Johnson's daughter, screenwriter and playwright Abigail McGrath, who generously contributed her mother's previously unpublished poems and letters as well as family photographs. . . . Johnson wrote boldly sensual and saucy poems in both traditional forms and free verse, wryly intelligent and gleamingly beautiful works in praise of earthiness and freedom from racism, sexism, and Puritanism. As frank, shrewd, fresh, and sexy now as then, Johnson's poems will at last take their proper place in American poetry."

Booklist

"The poems are impressive, not only in quality but in variety-ranging in length from four lines to four pages; in form, from sonnet to free verse; in style, from the use of dialect to allusions to the Bible and Greek mythology; in tone, from appreciation, sensuousness, and playfulness to contempt; and, in theme, from nature to love and race."-

Choice

"Johnson brought wit, skill, and a keen sense of observation to her poetry. Verner Mitchell here collects Johnson's thirty-four previously published pieces along with thirteen more, composed after she retired from public writing. Mitchell rounds off his volume with an introduction positioning the poet within the framework of the Harlem Renaissance, a chronology that unveils elements of a jealously guarded private life, selected letters, and an afterword by Johnson's daughter."

American Literature

"Johnson proves herself a lyricist of utmost delicacy yet steely precision; restraint attends her every meditation on love, race and loss."

Washington Post Book World

Verner D. Mitchell is associate professor of English at the University of Memphis and coeditor of Dorothy West's Where the Wild Grape Grows: Selected Writings, 1930–1950 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).

Poetry / Black Studies
160 pp., 10 illus.
$18.95s paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-572-2
September 2006

about placing orders on our secure server
ADD TO CART | VIEW CART | CHECKOUT