Approaching the Center First edition

Poetry. Cultural Writings. "Myronn Hardy is a poet of the world, universal in the truest sense. He brings [to us] the plazas of Havana, the villages of Madagascar, a tin schoolhouse in Soweto, an ancient wall in Rome scarred with racist graffiti. Hardy is sensitive to suffering and defiance of suffering all around him. The poet awakens ghosts, invoking Hughes and Lorca, two voices that resonate throughout the poems. Just as the poet spreads a map across a picnic table in Arkansas, showing his grandparents the "ghost lands" of Africa they have forgotten, so he maps a world of poetry for the rest of us, drawing a line from Soweto to Little Rock" - Martin Espada.