SOURCE: A Review of God's Trombones, in Poetry (Chicago), Vol. XXX, No. V, August, 1927, pp. 291-93.

In the following review, Monroe praises Johnson's God's Trombones as "his own highest achievement as a poet."

For some time Mr. Johnson has been known as a leader among the American Negro poets, and as by all odds their best editor. His Book of American Negro Poetry, and his two books of Spirituals, with their prefaces, are monuments of patient and sympathetic scholarship and of devotion to his race in its highest achievements.

The present volume [God's Trombones] is his own highest achievement as a poet. The author says modestly in his excellent preface:

I claim no more for these poems than that I have written them after the manner of the primitive sermons.

But it is something of an achievement to suggest, as he does, the spirit and rhythm of those...