ABSTRACT

The poetry of Dolores Kendrick reveals a spiritual consciousness alive with ancestral reverence, prophetic imagination, and an awareness of the historical, social, political and literary elements of African American culture. Kendrick's saturation in the diction and virtuoso rhythms of African American folk culture allows her to speak in tongues that she knows in the depths of her consciousness. Her's is the language of the Bible, the spirituals, the blues, and the striking metaphors of the black sermon. The dramatic pathos of her monologue is unrelenting. Though Kendrick's list of publications is short and the scholarship on her work scant, she has the reputation of being a poet's poet. Kendrick shares with Brooks a fierce dedication to craft, a reverence of history, the close examination of the stylistic and linguistic qualities of language, an admiration of the expressive originality of black folk traditions, and an intense desire to expose submerged images of black women.