Michael Harper is no polemicist. The three narratives which form Debridement—stories of John Brown, Richard Wright, and a black Vietnam veteran named John Henry Louis—are, rather, attempts of a more historical nature to illuminate the black experience in America. If that last reads uncomfortably like a college bulletin's description of a hurriedly assembled offering in black studies, so too does Debridement supply a kind of instant gratification, a fulfillment of its reader's prior expectations. Harper is obviously a serious poet, but his work is simply not daring, not sharp, not surprising enough. Applying a razor to language, he does, in some cases, succeed in jolting words from their customary associations, or in compressing nicely. But the strange punctuation (excessive use of colons, for example) obfuscates, and the retreat into the safety of the fragment conceals a basic inarticulacy. (pp. 175-76)

The most successful section of Debridement...