BEYOND THE BLUES. AMERICAN NEGRO POETRy

Read by Brock Peters, Gordon Heath, Vinette Carroll and Cleo Laine. Directed by Harley J. Usill. Argo Q RG338 (12 in., 30s. 110. plus 5s. Old. P.T.).

Collins. Soliloqui; Stevedore. Danner. I'll wallt the tight rope. Veasey. A moment please; American Gothic. Cuestas. Mea Culpa; Poem. Hayden. Full Moon; The Diver. Fields. Madness one Monday evening. Abrams. Circles in the sand. Miller. Calvary Way. Heath. Two Poems. Brooks. The Chicago defender sends a man to Little Rock. Dodson. The Confession Stone (a song cycle); Tell Rachel. Walker. October Journey. Brown, S. After Winter; Ma Rainey. Cullen, Incident. Evans. When in Rome. Cuney. My Lord, what a morning; Charles Parker. Brown, W, Saturday Night in Harlem; Hallelujah Corner: Durem. Now all you children. Jones. Why try, Hughes. When Sue wears red; Trumpet Player. Bond. I too hear America. Anderson. Blow man Blow. Morris. The Blues. Deiegall. Elegy to a Lady.

It's not surprising, I suppose, that the principal African art forms—music and the dance—have remained dominant in Amen, can Negro culture right up to the present day. Throughout most of their stay in the United States, after all, Negroes have been excessively under-privileged, a society growing up alongside yet never within the strict patterns of, European cultures. It explains for one thing, their lack of a literary tradition. Writers like the eighteenth-century Negro poets Jupiter Hammon and Phyllis Wheatley were exceptions, comparable in status (although not in the quality of their verses) to John Clare or Robert Bloomfield, patronized as curiosities rather than as writers. And despite the fact that between 1780 and 1897 about 40 collections of verse were published by Negroes in the US, the finest Negro poetry was always to be found in blues and ballads and work songs, and so, I think, it still is, despite the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and despite the work of poets like those represented ont his LP.

Some of the pieces here are moving, funny, apposite—but very few of them really work as poems. Too often they move within a single dimension, a limitation which is all right in a song lyric but a bit cramping for poetry. There is, in fact, too much explicit protest here, too much journalism disguised as verse, and too little poetry which works on its own terms through word and image and rhythm. Pa4

Veasey's A moment please is one of the better efforts-and uses two voices rather cunningly. Robert Hayden's Full Moon is another interesting piece, while Ted Jones's Why try blends observation and irony very neatly, and although I usually find poems about jazz rather embarrassing (they are rarely as good as the music they celebrate), Sterling Brown's Ma Rainey really does work, conveying something of how that bluessinger must have seemed to her audiences back in the 1920s.

But if the poems are often disappointing, the performances are generally excellent. Gordon Heath speaks clearly, without any excess of feeling, and so does Cleo Laine, although I was distoncerted at first by her assumed 'southern accent'. Brock Peters (very deep-voiced) and Vinette Carroll do well enough, although the latter over-acts in Walter Delegall's Elegy to a Lady, a too-sentimental piece about Billie Holiday. The LP is, in fact, thoroughly enjoyable, provided one accepts most of the poems as being interesting primarily because of their subject matter. So far, though, American Negro society has not produced an individual poet (a 'literary poet', that is) who compares with the great Negro musicians and singers. It's all a question of tradition, of creating a climate of writing. Probably the first major Negro poet will be almost exactly contemporary with the first major European jazz musician-and for precisely the same reasons.

All the poems included on this LP, I ought to add, are contained-along with many others-in "Beyond The Blues", an anthology edited by Dr. Rosey E. Pool and published by The Hand and Flower Press, price 8s. 6d. CHARLES Fox.

THE BIBLE IN SCOTS. The Nativity Story, preceded by Isaiah's prophecy of the coming of Christ. The first two chapters and a further selection from the Book of Proverbs. The Miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand and the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The Psalms of David-Psalms 23, 100, 121, 124 and 137. Translated and read by The Rev. James L. Dow. Waverley f ZLP2008 (12 in., 29s. 51d. plus 4s. 91d.

Easy, natural translation, well suited to these particular passages. The same goes for Mr. Dow's reading. The Sassenach ear is defeated by about one word in each sentence, though with such familiar material one can often guess its meaning; but by then one is a phrase or two behind. The unfamiliarity of the dialect sounds would presumably disappear with repetition; even so, I would say "chiefly for readers north of the Border". G. J.G.