SOURCE: A review of The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou and Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4, Autumn, 1995, p. 800.

In the following review, Cookson praises Angelou's use of black-speech rhythms, inflections and patterns in her poetry.

Maya Angelou's five volumes of poems are here collected, reset in a handsome typeface, and produced in a collector's first edition. As a sort of companion volume, her publisher, Random House, has brought out a separate, pocket-size volume of “four poems celebrating women,” entitled Phenomenal Woman (after the title poem). It too is handsomely designed; the publisher no doubt hopes to capitalize on the wider recognition of the poet, following her reading of her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the inauguration of President Clinton in 1993.

Angelou's poems celebrate black people, men and women; at the same time, they bear witness to the trials...