The poetry of perception is not the same as the poetry of drama. In ""For Colored Girls," Ntozake Shange arranged her acid and lyrical perceptions into a fine, loose-jointed set of meditations and sketches.

They had the design and rhythm of a song-cycle; the pieces were funny, exuberant or acrid, and Miss Shange's remarkable poetic diction took the role of music in binding them together. Themes would appear and reappear, but a formal dramatic structure was not attempted or needed.

Miss Shange is something besides a poet but she is not—at least not at this stage—a dramatist. More than anything else, she is a troubadour. She declares her fertile vision of the love and pain between black women and black men in outbursts full of old malice and young cheerfulness. They are short outbursts, song-length; her characters are perceived in flashes, in illuminating vignettes.

Some of...