Books by Henry Dumas

Ark of Bones (1970) / Poetry for My People (1971) /   Play Ebony  Play Ivory   (1974)  / Jonah and the Green Stone (1976)

 Rope of Wind and Other Stories (1979)  / Goodbye, Sweetwater (1988) / Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989)

 Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas

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Play Ebony Play Ivory

By Henry Dumas

Edited by Eugene B. Redmond

134 pp. New York / Random House. / Cloth $5.95 Paper $2.95

Reviewed By Julius Lester

Henry Dumas was 34 when he was killed by a white policeman in 1968. Fortunately, his creative potential had matured enough so that his poetry can be read without one's judgments being influenced by the reverberating echoes of the bullets that ended his life.

Dumas's poetic range was wide, and in an older, more accomplished poet, this would have indicated versatility. Dumas was still the poet-in-search-of-his-subject, however, exploring moods, themes and forms with uneven results. Many of his short poems read like fragments that might have found their form, if there had been time. Other poems suffer from excessive imagery, coyness and manufactured black rage. A section of blues lyrics is embarrassingly bad and a poem called "Cuttin Down to Size" is an unfortunate excursion into anti-Semitism.

Dumas's talent asserts itself more effectively when he writes from within an experience rather than above it. In the autobiographical "Son of Msippi," there are overtones of Jean Toomer ("Bare walk and can stalk / Make a hungry belly talk"), and an intentional Whitmanesque image:

A few lines later, however, he shatters this perception of the river with an image that could have been written only by a black poet: "the  bone-filled Mississippi."

Dumas's authentic voice is heard most clearly when he writes from within what seems to have been his subject: Africa and Nature. He is the first Afro-American poet to speak convincingly in the voice of an African.

Dumas does not personify nature; he becomes it. Nature is not an object of beauty, but a living, articulate organism.

"Love Song of a Lamb" is an erotic poem by a lamb.

In the sparse lines of "Hunt," the poet speaks as a dog. The majestic "Ngoma" effectively creates and melds the sound of "ngoma" (Swahili for drum) with the heartbeat of the unborn child in the stomach of the woman narrator of the poem. It is a stunning achievement.

Besides the African voice, Dumas also had a lyric one which was beginning to approach the purity of haiku

At his best, Henry Dumas was the most original Afro-American poet of the sixties, and this book is the portrait of a poet in the budding time. Thanks to a white policeman, there will be no flowering.

Source: New York Times Book Review (9/19/75)

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About the Editor (in 1975)

Eugene B. Redmond, poet, essayist and playwright, is professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at California State University, Sacramento. He has taught at several United States colleges and universities, including Southern Illinois University, where he was a colleague of Henry Dumas. Redmond's books of poetry are Sides of the River (1969,) Sentry of the Four Golden Pillars (1970), River of Bones and Flesh and Blood (1971), Songs from an Afro/Phone (1972), Consider Loneliness As These Things, and In a Time of Rain & Desire 1973); his LP recording of poetry, Bloodlinks and Sacred Places, was released by Black River Writers in 1973. He edited Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History (1976) and Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas (2003)

During the sixties, Redmond edited Midwestern community newspapers and served for two years as senior consultant to Katherine Dunham at the Performing Arts Training Center in East St. Louis. His writings have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including Black World, Journal of Black Poetry, The Black Scholar, Open Poetry, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Black Orpheus, American Dialog, Discourses on Poetry and The New Black Poetry.

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updated 13 April 2009