In the key of life/a review

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2005 by Samantha Thornhill

Tears For Water: Songbook of Poems & Lyrics by Alicia Keys, G.P Putnam's Sons, December 2004, $19.95, ISBN 0-399-15257-1

This work is a curious amalgamation of what the singer-songwriter reveals in her introduction as her most "delicate" and "secret" thoughts, followed by her most famous ones-her song lyrics. In this sense, the book immediately becomes an oxymoron: how different are her lyrics from her poems? How much of the real Keys is pressed into these pages? How private is this poetry we were never meant to see?

Unsurprisingly, the poems are rather songlike. In fact, if it weren't for the distinct section breaks, it would be nearly impossible to distinguish Keys's songs from her poems stylistically; most of her poems employ rhyme and repetition with the frequency of a pop ballad. The way to best separate the two is by content. The songs deal mostly with romance, while the poems explore artificiality, alienation and other areas of humanity. For instance, "Gold of Johannesburg," has some lovely lines about finding one's own inner freedom through music:

   And songs of freedom
   Are all that I own
   Songs of freedom
   That can never be sold
   And that is where I find
   The gold of Johannesburg
   The diamonds of Cape Town
   The precious woods of the Amazon

Several of the poems offer uplifting messages and equally realistic moments of melancholy and angst. This emotional range in Keys's work can prove itself more than beneficial to younger audiences.

Unfortunately, the poems themselves have little to no command of language. Though "Unfulfilled Keys" (where the speaker uses piano keys as an extended metaphor for a man) and "Lilly of the Valley" (where a flower is a stripper) employ clever analogies, there is hardly any metaphor in the work itself. Paltry uses of image, musicality and other literary tools cripple the poems immensely, leaving them barren cliche-ridden playgrounds.

In the short essay following the poem "Cosmopolitan Woman" (Keys inserts explanations after some poems), Keys explicates that the poem was inspired by her visit to an African AIDS clinic where glossy images of carefree white women were strewn all over the waiting room tables:

   I don't wanna be
   No cosmopolitan woman
   With big ol' city sophistication
   And a facade of perfection
   Every page of the story
   Filled with predictability
   Of a lost soul ...

The initial observation--ironic, astute and heartbreaking--is more compelling than the poem itself. The poem ends up bending more toward redundant self-affirmation and further away from the epidemic.

As previously mentioned, Keys's intro proclaims the intimate nature of these poems. Many of them are indeed introspective though weighted by an overabundance of threadbare lines and phrases. In this sense, the work fails to create the magical connection between author and reader. Because of lack of texture, the poems end up not feeling intimate at all but general and nonspecific. Keys's poetic voice lust isn't developed enough yet to allow her true phosphorescence to shine.

--Reviewed by Samantha Thornhill