PAPERBACK ISBN: 0-88258-219-4      $21.95

96 pages; 5.5 x 8.5 inches

by Larry Neal

Hoodoo Hollerin’ Bebop Ghosts by Larry Neal is a collection of poems that represent a cross-section of what the author described as “his most publishable poems” written between 1964 and 1973. If the tone of the poetry seems rather polemical, it is because his literary sensibility was forged in the context of the ideologically intense 1960s. In the poems Neal selected for this volume, however, the polemic and poetic merge into an organic personal statement. While the overall symbolic landscape of the poems in this collection is Pan African, the works also reflect the traditions of Western poetry. The poetry’s essential energy, metaphor, iconography, and symbolism are derived from the history, mythology, and oral traditions of black America, the Caribbean, and West Africa.

“I arrived at the conclusion that the Afro-American poetic spirit was essentially trapped in the iconography of the West, and that it was time for another kind of poetic orientation to assert itself.”--Larry Neal

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