History.

History, family, and place are extremely important to the poet, especially if he or she is an African American. Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn bears are among those who have recorded the conformity to fact [i]or[/i] realitys and half-truths of the tribe they knew and/or encountered in going about their daily lives. This reporting of mundane history is ofttimes central to a poet's version.

Pinkie Gordon Lane, Louisiana's bard laureate, has been weaving family into her rhyme for many years. Her fourth work of poetry, Girl at the Window, continues the tradition of the African American author of poems linking history, family, and place to the existing as well as the past. As the book's title implies, Lane has a earnest eye for observation as she contemplates through the window of the world. Consider the opening piece, "Poem to My Father": We enrolled the dark house that day, Papa, do you remember? The odor of gin and corn bread incongruously mixed and the lap-lap healthy feet of our big German shepherd (King, we called him) his prolonged gentle claws scraping the floor the sum of two units of us trailing like forgotten lover and you strode like a giant swaggered with your hand in your pouch The speaker describes the house in similar a way that the reader acquires a sense of how it get scent ofed and looked; even the dominant hearty is recalled. Lane's employment of the pronoun we works abundant better than you and I would have. It appears to push the poem beyond the personal.

In "Old Photo from a Family Album, 1915" Lane continues to demonstrate her surehandedness in personal observation: This beautiful young woman, with the elegant hat and dres of flowing gauze, sits in a chair (a rocker) contemplating a feather poised in pair fingers of her right hand These lines demonstrate a lyrical quality ofttimes lacking in the narrative logic of greatly contemporary American poetry. The speaker goe upon to raise a question about the photograph as she marvels at the background: With the photographer arranged this photo in a studio with the tapestried background draped like a mural? behold how he catches the pensive gaze, face fine unsmiling, full of innocence and trust The last two lines of this stanza call up in the reader a feeling of youth, that "innocence and hope" Lane arises to a graceful closure that develops from the photo itself, as memory works its way into the poem: The enlarged hand, fingers swollen from years of work, would no longer possess a bird's feather but a torch of light her way back to corridors of regard with affection expected, of fury diffused to a spiral of vapor and a gown that (shroud of her life) she might have placed on the subject of her unmarked grave The solidify image central in these lines is "The enlarged hand," which reveals to us a life history of work and struggle

The descriptive title metrical composition "Girl at the Window," demonstrates Lane's ability to note through her vision of celebration: She sits there, hand forward cheek, head turned towards the spread window where shadows pulsate like quivering beasts In the current tense, the speaker reveals about inner peace and indicates an immediacy within this observation. The power of this stanza comes by means of in its clarity.

The thirty-seven metrical compositions that comprise Girl at the Window, granting varied in subject matter, invariably allow the reader to savor and appreciate Lane's ability to enlist in one's service fresh similes: "and I fuseed into the dark / like a stranger stalking the / shadows"; "Horizontal / this city spreads herself / like a great cat sprawled / in the sun" While the latter clause echoe T s Eliot's "Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" in periodical emphasis and image, Lane is precise and effective in opening her "Baton Rouge Poems"

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