SOURCE: "Nikki Giovanni: Place and Sense of Place in Her Poetry," in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, University of Alabama Press, 1990, pp. 279-99.

In the following essay, Cook discusses the theme of place in Giovanni's poems, arguing that Giovanni's most important poems are not the early, militant poems, but those which are greatly concerned with place, home and family.

Nikki Giovanni's poetry has been most often viewed by literary critics in the tradition of militant black poetry; the first serious critical article on her work, in fact, is R. Roderick Palmer's "The Poetry of Three Revolutionists: Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni" (College Language Association Journal, September 1971). More recent critics, especially Suzanne Juhasz in her Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, A New Tradition (1976), have emphasized the developing feminism in Giovanni's poems. No critic has yet focused on what I see as...