The Moments, the Minutes, the Hours: The Poetry of Jill Scott Review

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(More customer reviews)Jill Scott is a singer and performer, though I have only rarely heard her music. Sonia Sanchez wrote a wonderful encomium for Scott, saying, "I know Jill Scott. She is pot liquor and cornbread. She is caviar and champagne. She is a blues song and a spirtual. She is Nina, Leontyne, Sarah, Aretha." Sanchez' poetry is one of the wonders of the 20th century so I decided to give her protégé a try. It wound up with me liking the book and I imagine many will too. Unlike Sanchez, her subject matter is not very variegated. It's all about love, love, and more love, and then there's some about feminism and black pride. She can compose infinite variations on these three topics, but after awhile you're like, "Oh, not another haiku about crazy love." However in a later section of the book Scott experiments with taking on different personae and these are much stronger. One poem takes the point of view of the adult looking back to days of childhood and realizing her mother loved her.
"She cries when she sees me/ holds me close when she knows I need me/ "Mommy" I say/ "Mommy" I say/ Smells so good/ Reminds me to go out and play/ makes me strawberry lemonade."
The sights and sounds of ordinary life are wistfully accounted for, almost as though she wasn't a star and just Jill from the block you might say. There's another poem that alludes to the pain of having lost a child, rather like Joni Mitchell's poignant "Little Green." And the best of all she speaks from the perspective of a roughened, overworked street prostitute with a broken soul whose age becomes the turning point of the poem's final, shocking lines. In her preface, Scott gives credit to her forebears, including Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson. This poem "One of the Reasons" will remind readers of some of the soliloquy poems of Sapphire.

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