SOURCE: A review of Beckonings, in Black Scholar, Vol. 15, no. 6, November-December, 1984, pp. 63-4.

In the following review, Brown offers positive evaluation of Beckonings.

This special edition of Gwendolyn Brook's Beckonings can be found on the local library shelf in a beige and chocolate cover. The poems will have private meanings for most poets. In 1975, I was writing the poems which were published in Lightyears. Gwendolyn Brooks was one of those distant ethereal figures whose works I stood in line to buy at bookstores. Her volumes were curiously hard to obtain. Fortunately, for me and about twenty-five other people, the Poet Laureate of Illinois and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize read at the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania on April 26, 1983. Her reading was sponsored by Dr. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations as well as the President and Provost of the University. Before...