Giving a Lyrical Voice to an Icon : STILL LIFE IN HARLEM by Eddy L. Harris; Henry Holt $20, 224 pages

In “Still Life in Harlem,” Eddy L. Harris does for the storied New York neighborhood of Harlem what countless American writers have already done for Brooklyn--he reports on the urban terrain at street level while exalting what he sees as an icon of American civilization.

“Harlem is the alabaster vessel that holds the Blackamerican heart, that holds the history and hope of Blackamerica,” writes Harris, using the word he has coined to describe the history and culture of African Americans. “Harlem carries on its back the psychological freight of a people and perhaps of an entire nation as well.”

Harris harks back to the golden age of the Harlem Renaissance and conjures up the luminaries who were drawn there in the 1920s: “I felt that I was walking among the ghosts of Harlem’s past,” he writes of his experience in returning to Harlem, “that I was coming here as . . . Langston Hughes had come and Duke Ellington had come--coming home, coming to find peace, coming to gain in Harlem a sense of self and a new way of defining oneself. . . .”

Such lyrical moments are the glory of “Still Life,” and the book fairly glows with the passion and poetry that Harris brings to his observations of the history and destiny of Harlem. But his book is not merely a sentimental memoir or a soft-focus celebration of some idealized version of Harlem. Indeed, Harris entertains the notion that “Harlem might very well be the darkest, dirtiest and most dangerous place on the face of this earth”--and he insists on asking why it is so.

If Harris sometimes slips into poetics, he is also capable of brutal and unflinching reportage. He is plain-spoken when he describes what can be seen and heard from his window--a man killing rats on the sidewalk, a drunken couple arguing in a nearby apartment, a man beating a woman against a stone wall, all of which symbolize the sorry fate that Harlem and its people have suffered in recent years.

“I remember thinking what a beautiful place Harlem must have been at one time,” Harris muses, “and wondering where the beauty went.”

What makes “Still Life in Harlem” so remarkable--and so important--is that Harris gives voice to an experience of American life that rarely finds its ways into American letters. He spent two years in Harlem in an effort to connect with his heritage and identity as a black man, and “Still Life” tells us as much about Harris himself as it does about Harlem.

At certain poignant and telling moments, for example, Harris casts his memory back to his own childhood and especially his father, whom the author describes without irony as “the embodiment of black manhood” and whom he credits with giving him “a mandate that I create for myself a world of my own, one that not only would make sense for me but that I could put my faith in.” His father asks: “Do you ever regret the life you’ve lived?”--and Harris allows us to witness exactly how shattering the question can be: “I shout my replies into each Harlem night.”

Even when Harris is contemplating the here-and-now of Harlem, the experiences of childhood become a moral touchstone. He recalls the day he saw one man stab another man to death and then laugh out loud, which prompts us to wonder: How many children growing up on the mean streets of cities across America have seen a similar sight? What do they make of it? And Harris suggests an answer to these questions when he allows us to look into the eyes of men who have suffered too much for too long.

“It is the look in their eyes of insignificance, no matter how defiant their gestures, the look of not being taken seriously, the look of being ignored,” he writes. “It is the look of believing what they have been told about themselves.”

But Harris takes them seriously, recognizes their significance, and thus redeems the forgotten men and women of Harlem and “Blackamerica” whose plight is the real concern of “Still Life.” He shows us what is really at stake on the streets of Harlem, where “war rages because so little else exists to reinforce a man’s image of himself.” And he holds out the hope for “a time when the black man will be able to die to himself and reemerge in glory.”

So, in the end, compassion prevails over rancor, and hope over despair. “Someone has to care,” says a woman who sits on her stoop on a Harlem street and watches out for the children no one else cares about. So, too, does Harris care for the people whose lives he describes, and it is the genius of his book that Harris makes us care too.