Bobweaving Detroit: The Selected Poems of Murray Jackson

From a poet whose vision and vistas embrace Detroit's glass-strewn streets and soaring high-rises, this collection is universal yet site-specific in its evocation of jazz and its improvisations on the classics.

Bobweaving Detroit is Murray Jackson's final collection of poems. Dr. Jackson, a highly respected educator, political figure and philanthropist, as well as an internationally known poet, offers work rich in the history and hope of Detroit's Black urban--and urbane--tradition. Jackson was a Classicist as well as an athlete, an inspiring teacher and an inspired humanist whose poems engage the blues vernacular, a wide palate of visual arts, and a broad spectrum of musical sources.

Murray Jackson was always a poet, though he first published with Broadside Press, Detroit's and the nation's longest continuously publishing Black poetry press, after a long career of public service during which he opened Detroit's first community college and many other educational and artistic venues to his fellow citizens and scholars. Readers of poetry and lovers of the arts, humanities, and athletics can recognize and join Jackson's conversations--his "bobweaving"-- with Langston Hughes, Julius Caesar, Mozart, Duke Ellington, Archie Moore and Marianne Moore, William Shakespeare and Willie the Pimp, Coleman Hawkins and Coleman Young, Malcolm X and Malcolm Boyd.