First Light And Other Poems [Paperback]

Born in 1960 in Newark, New Jersey, Roberts Counts grew up poor in the projects. Incarcerated at twenty, he began to read everything he could find from Shakespeare and Malcolm X to Einstein and Robert Frost. Gradually, he taught himself to write poetry. His poems, signed Ishmael Shamsid-din-as he was known for almost thirty years-deal with ghetto violence, the goodness and beauty of nature, and love as a source of redemption. With wit and lyric energy, Counts shows us what it takes to resist bitterness and nurture hope. These are poems of struggle: with language, in the first instance; with the mechanisms that spin the universe; with the gods and goddesses of love; but most of all with a recalcitrant self which refuses worn and easy paths. -Paul Lauter, Editor, The Heath Anthology of American Literature

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