David Henderson’s poetry is the world echo, with the strenght and, if you are conscious, beauty of the place tone… David Henderson is conscious, though it does not make him hover bodily but spiritually, he is no lighter-than-air attachment to the race. He is their magic thrust. Their attainment.”
Amiri Baraka
De Major of Harlem is full the language of incantation, uniting fragments of history and contemporary impression as if in a visionary state of mind.”
Time
For thos of us who know ‘The Work,’ The major of Harlem is truly a delight
Ishmael Redd, Black World
Poetry and prose poem are forget…into musical composition of low register and up-tempo blues, canticles, jugband sounds, solo strings, and jazz-like riffs…highflying pulse and surge…worthy passion…Apoet whose sometimes rhapsodic voice brings off a sharp sense of place.
But the most memorable are his big, sprawling documentaries, the blues and camelwalks, the atonal horns, and the verbal alchemies of his songs of squalor. Explosive, bitter, charged with outrage and spleen, Henderson’s poems display a gift for social exposition.
Colette Inez, Panassus: Poetry in Review
David Henderson follow[s] John Coltrane – and to a lesser extent Miles Davis – in the cultivation of the long, fragmented, natural prose line, the attention to realistic details polished to precision, the reliance upon unconventional syntax and upon a voice with a volume that is preferably fortissimo and a tempo that is often presto… David Henderson turns his back upon the drift of much modern poetic practice to offer the facts, statistics, and details of mundane reality wich Whitman cherished so much, and, in “Keep On Pushing”, with more than a little of Whitman’s skill in suggesting tension, motion, and a sense of a developing action of heroic proportions.”
Charles T. Davis, Black Is the Color of the Cosmos