The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry
"The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years."--Publishers Weekly
"All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it."--Publishers Weekly
"If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it."—NPR
"The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--The Washington Post
"The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton—both the woman and her poetry—is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."—Toni Morrison, from the Foreword
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965–1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career.
On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America.
"mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days):
all that I am asking is
that you see me as something
more than a common occurrence,
more than a woman in her ordinary skin.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Clifton (1936 2010) was undeniably a major American poet; her poems, best known for their expressions of feminist ideals, African-American history and contemporary life, and intimate family life, cover a vast array of human experiences, as this surprisingly large complete volume attests. The average Clifton poem isn't quite half a page long, and most of her books were slim indeed, so it is nothing short of astounding to find that she wrote quite this much. Luckily she did, for here is a formidable life's work. From the earliest poems collected here, we see the familial merged seamlessly with the political, the general woven with the homespun, "certainty" sought and found in "the truth of potatoes/ steaming the panes and/ butter/ gold and predictable as/ heroes in history." Some poems, like "after kent state" roil with anger and fierce identification "white ways are/ the way of death/ come into the black/ and live" while others, like "earth" take in an almost biblically panoramic view in just a few lines: "it bore varicolored/ flowers children bees/ all this used to be a/ place once all this/ was a nice place/ once." Clifton was a master of minimalism and understatement, able to use techniques that would fail utterly in lesser poets' hands single-word lines, no punctuation or capital letters, the lowercase "i" as a pronoun to startling effect, even when she's just writing about the trials of being a poet, as in "after the reading" ("i throw myself into/ Howard Johnson's bed/ and long for home,/ that sad mysterious country/ where nobody notices/ a word I say"), or about undergoing treatment for cancer, as in "lumpectomy eve": "love calls you to this knife/ for love for love// all night it is the one breast/ comforting the other." Elsewhere, Clifton could spin a timeless myth out of a few stark lines: "in the dream of foxes/ there is a field/ and a procession of women/ clean as good children." All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it.
