Review by Booklist Review
Path-breaking writer, teacher, and intellectual hooks continues mining her memories of her childhood in the Kentucky hills and her reflections on the ties between African Americans and the land. These subjects shape her essay collection, Belonging: A Culture of Place (2008). Here she turns to poetry, as she did in When Angels Speak of Love (2007), specifically the elegy, to mourn what was lost when black farmers were forced off their land and to celebrate what can be reclaimed. In this book-length cycle ofpoems about history, family, cultivation, and nature, hooks writes of ancestral rights / to turn the ground over ; of the earth that is all at once a grave / a resting place a bed of new beginnings / avalanche of splendor ; and of bloodshed and healing, toil and torment, mud, crops, wildflowers, and swans. Sown with images of rain and fertility, captive animals and enslaved people, grass beyond green and the ravages of coal mining, hooks' distilled lyrics possess the weight of stones in a foundation and logs in a cabin even as they sing and soar.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
