This volume gathers four of Maya Angelou’s early poetry collections — Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie, Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, And Still I Rise, and Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? — bringing together work written across the 1970s and early 1980s.

Angelou’s use of voice is intoxicating. It's direct, rhythmic, performative, often close to speech; it's a song, a sermon and the blues. Across the collections, private and public meld, desire sits beside dispossession; humour beside anger; intimacy beside the long afterlife of slavery and segregation. Angelou’s poems are often formally plainspoken, but that apparent simplicity is structural rather than slight. Read together, the four books show how insistently she treated the speaking voice as both literary form and social fact.

Bantam Books, New York, 1993. Bantam reissue paperback collecting four earlier poetry volumes. Noticeable edge wear, rubbing and creasing to covers; internally sound with light age toning.