CICELY TYSON

A lyrical salute to the long-lived performer, fashion plate, and human rights activist.

“Nine decades she lived: / 96 years. 35,105 days,” Watson writes of Cicely Tyson (1924-2021). She goes on in flights of free verse to lay out a life lived “to do good in the world,” from early days growing up in the South Bronx as a “brown-skinned girl with twig legs” through early devotion to music and modeling, successes on stage and screen, and later years as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. “We cannot do enough, we cannot give enough, Cicely said. / We have to give back.” The author tucks in lines from spirituals to give her tribute further feeling and sonority and, to add broader context, intersperses biographical poems with general evocations of Black experiences in different historical eras: “Black is Emmett Till / and Medgar Evers / and Rosa Parks / and that preacher man King.” Shine, best known as a quilter, incorporates brightly hued and patterned fabric piecework into elegant, fashion-forward portraits of Tyson posing with dignity at various ages and in group scenes with other stylized, brown-skinned figures.

Further brightens a light who was already shining.