On the opening pages of Carver:  A Life in Poems, Marilyn Nelson reminds her reader of the seriously spiritual side of George Washington Carver—botanist, inventor, painter, musician, and teacher.

I thoroughly understand that there are scientists to whom the world is merely the result of chemical forces or material electrons. I do not belong to this class.

A personal relationship with the Great Creator of all things is the only foundation for the abundant life.  The farther we get away from self, the greater life will be.

Much is known about the life of Carver, and Marilyn Nelson has drawn from this abundance of material, including many photographs, to tell his story through poems.  Thus, young readers can explore another way of presenting the life of an historic person.  Carver was born a slave in Missouri in 1864, and was raised, after emancipation, by the white couple who had owned his mother.  They encouraged him to seek an education, and he finally earned a master’s degree and was invited to begin the agricultural department at the all-black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. 

Carver faced serious challenges from those who would not recognize his great intelligence and accomplishments because of his color, but they did not discourage him from his efforts to make life better for farmers in the rural South through his crop studies and for his students at Tuskegee Institute.  Nelson carefully balances her poems between lighthearted descriptions of “Cafeteria Food,” during Carver’s undergraduate days at Iowa State, where “even when it’s good, it’s bad,” to descriptions of Carver as the class over-achieving “Curve-Breaker,” and the more darkly serious ones such as “The Perceiving Self” in which Carver witnesses a lynching.  Another poem mentions the criticism he received from the New York Times who felt  that he was bringing “ridicule” on his race and on Tuskegee “because REAL scientists do not ascribe their successes to ‘inspiration.’”  And yet this man of intelligence, perseverance, and faith made changes in the world that would impact the lives of farmers throughout the South and provide educational chances for people of color who would follow in his footsteps.  A true Renaissance man, he was also such an accomplished artist that he was named a Fellow in the British Royal Society for the Arts, the first black man ever so named, while at home he crocheted small presents for his friends. Carver:  A Life in Poems is an excellent model of how to use photographs and history to produce another type of literature—poetic historical fiction.