By: Clarence Major

While Major's Configurations: New & Selected Poems 1958-1998 was nominated for a National Book Award, this is his most subtle and beautiful book yet, highlighting his impressive range of styles and his precision of expression. Major explores his sense of place and its links to landscape, art, love and home in poems like "Purple California Mountains, near Half Moon Bay."

Divided into three parts, the collection begins with meditative poems that echo Gary Snyder in their close observation of the wild California landscape. Yet Major also uses precise Creeley-esque stanzas and notebook jottings to show humans overwhelmed by nature. From "Habitat: Time and Place, Cambria, California, 1999."

Part II moves from California to poems on paintings and Paris; these poems gracefully and obliquely address both the acceptance and the dislocation an artist of color feels in the City of Light, with its history of harboring Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Countee Cullen and other ‚migr‚s from the United States. A wide-ranging third section moves from abstract poems like "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me" to poems-on-poetry, such as "What Is a Symbol?" to the lovely title poem of the book, which skillfully combines shades of Beckett's Waiting for Godot with the subtle nostalgia of waiting to find place, a home, identity, or the mysterious and undefined Sweet Betty herself.

This collection has been well worth waiting for.

By: Clarence Major

Using his poet's eye for detail and his novelist's ear for speech, Major (who was shortlisted for a 1999 National Book Award for Configurations) mutes his voice to create his mother's memoir. With authentic plainness, Inez who is light, not white relates her journey to self-fulfillment through a world of demented racial complexity. In a country where a white woman could give birth to a black child but a black woman could not give birth to a white child, Inez lives a secret life as a white woman. Issues of race (as she deals with the employment opportunities available to her only as a white woman) and issues of gender (as Inez deals with an abusive husband) occupy, by virtue of their social significance, the core of this skillfully written book. The rich details of growing up (school, games, friends, church) and of family life (courting, marriage, babies, dying) give Major's book particular vitality. Captured through the vision of one woman, interchangeably black or white in a time and place where she could not be both, Inez's memoir moves from plantation to segregation to migration. As one generation's smallpox becomes another's measles, as Aunt Saffrey's fancy horse-drawn buggy is outmoded by Pa's new Chevrolet, as Inez moves from tiny Dublinville to the big city of Atlanta, a whole history of African-American life unfolds. Women readers will find Inez's resilience and perseverance inspirational.

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