The profoundly introspective and retrospective poetry of Chicago writer Sterling D. Plumpp represents an important development in post-black arts writing: a return to earlier notions of literary blackness. Thus it is to writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin that one must look for major sources of influence.

Plumpp's work is remarkably free of the restrictions imposed by the black aesthetic movement on such matters as subject matter, diction, and aesthetic stance. In his poetry, for instance, and in his limited forays into fiction, the Southern rural experience is on an equal footing with that of the urban Midwest. Although the swiftness of his extraordinary phrasing owes much to the example of the jazz musician, the blues and the spiritual are probably more central to his work--especially as sources of situation, character delineation, tone, and diction. Indeed, the range and complexity...