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Raymond Nelson, ed. "Harlem Gallery" and Other Poems. By Melvin B. Tolson. Intro. by Rita Dove. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1999. 473 pp. $60.00 cloth/$18.95 paper.
Reviewed by Edward Brunner Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Between 1944 and 1965, Melvin B. Tolson published three volumes of poetry that consolidate his reputation as one of the most original artists of the postwar years and one of the most demanding artists of modernity. Tolson's intellectually rigorous verse, always tending toward the extended sequence, is as unnerving as 1940s bebop, itself a determinedly ambitious statement that celebrates the wide-ranging authority and assimilative prowess of the black American. In poems designed to be equal in every respect to the sequences of Pound, Eliot, and Crane and which elaborately encode references to African and African American history, Tolson mounts, in Aldon Nielsen's words, "an assault upon Anglo-American modernism's territorial designs."
Although Tolson wrote plays and novels (all unpublished), he received accolades in his lifetime only for his poetry. Raymond Nelson's edition reproduces photographically the first printings of Tolson's three published volumes, along with thirty-four pages of uncollected poems that appeared in journals. As the volume's title suggests, though, the spotlight falls on Tolson's last work, the 150page Harlem Gallery (1965), to which Nelson has appended over 100 pages of invaluable explanatory footnotes. Along with adding his own, he has streamlined, adapted, and when necessary corrected the 750-plus footnotes that Robert Julian Huot assembled for his pioneering (but unpublished) 1971 University of Utah Ph.D. dissertation, heretofore the only guidebook for scholars through the thickets of Tolson's text, as Nelson-somewhat stingily, in my opinion-attests (though Huot contributed mightily to our understanding, he receives just a half-- sentence of acknowledgment). Nelson has also...