The Seventh Octave

Danny Simmons employs both his skills as an artist and a writer to present this attractive book entitled “ I DREAMED MY PEOPLE Were Calling But I Couldn’t FIND MY WAY Home.The bright colors of his collages provide a contrast to the relentlessly grim portrayals of a society where people are jailed at birth. He is able to create beauty from rubbish.This is no dinner party on Martha’s Vineyard.”Cold ramble down abandoned/…stray dogs howling in bitter/winter huddled six deep and hungry,or I/am a gaping wound waiting for its/daily does of salt. No French Impressionist picnic scenes . While European Museums are packed with paintings overburdened with Christian themes, Simmons knows that the religions that Africans brought to this hemisphere, thought to have been crushed, survive. But there’s a tendency when examining the work of a black artist to confine their reach to the basic and polemical,even though the work under examination might express a wide range of human emotions. The mainstream asks of the black artist, “What are you going to do to us? Do you like us? What do those drums mean?”Simmons work can be political, but it can also be very private. “I return/ to empty/street corners/to rail at the/ scourge who/gnaws at the bones of/my past. Though African-American culture is Simmons’ home base, one can detect variety of influences upon his work. Simmons writes:”…I swagger/in front of the/Easel trying to capture/the spirit of the divine.” He has done that. The paintings are eye grabbing, beautiful. The texts provide a striking compliment to them. -from the foreword by Ishmael Reed