Lucille Clifton, Poet

lucille clifton
Photo Courtesy of BOA Editions, Ltd.

In 2007, Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936 to February 13, 2010) became the first African American woman to win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most prestigious American poetry awards and one of the largest literary honors for work in the English language. Clifton has also won the National Book Award in poetry for Blessing the Boats (BOA Editions, 2000), and is the only author ever to have two collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (BOA Editions, 1987) and Next: New Poems (BOA Editions, 1987), named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in one year.

Clifton has received fellowships from the NEA, an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Shelley Memorial Prize and the Charity Randall Citation. She was a Distinguished Professor of Humanities as St. Mary’s College in Maryland. She was appointed a Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected as Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999. She lived in Columbia, MD.

Lucille Clifton with Quincy Troupe, 21 May 1996

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (American Poets Continuum)
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Edited by Kevin Young

Hardcover: 720 pages
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (September 11, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1934414905
ISBN-13: 978-1934414903

"If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it."—NPR

"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Clifton 1965-2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems.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.

Lucille Clifton reading at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival

voices Voices
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Hardcover: 72 pages
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (November 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1934414115
ISBN-13: 978-1934414118
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.5 inches

In Voices, Clifton continues her celebrated aesthetic of writing poems for the disempowered and the underprivileged while finding humor and redemption among life’s many hardships. This book also highlights Clifton’s ability to write inventive dramatic monologues. Voices includes monologues spoken by animals, as well as by the food product spokespeople Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the apparently nameless guy on the Cream of Wheat box.

“cream of wheat”

sometimes at night
we stroll the market aisles
ben and jemima and me they
walk in front humming this and that
i lag behind
trying to remove my chef’s cap
wondering what ever pictured me
then left me personless
rastus
i read in an old paper that i was called rastus
but no mother ever
gave that to her son
toward dawn we head back
to our shelves
our boxes ben and jemima and me
we pose and smile i simmer
to myself what is my name

BOA Editions is thrilled to present the newest poetry collection by the one and only Lucille Clifton.

Mercy Mercy
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Paperback: 79 pages
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (September 1, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1929918550
ISBN-13: 978-1929918553
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches

Lucille Clifton’s poetry carries her deep concerns for the world’s children, the stratification of American society, those people lost or forgotten amid the crushing race of Western materialism and technology. In turns sad, troubled and angry, her voice has always been one of great empathy, knowing, as she says, “the only mercy is memory.” In this, her 12th book of poetry, the National Book Award-winner speaks to the tenuous relationship between mothers and daughters, the debilitating power of cancer, the open wound of racial prejudice, the redemptive gift of story-telling. “September Song,” a sequence of seven poems, featured on National Public Radio, presents a modern-day Orpheus who, through her grief, attempts to heart-intelligently respond to the events of September 11th. The last sequence of poems—a tightly-woven fabric of caveats and prayers—was initially written in the 1970s, then revised and reshaped in the last few years.

everette anderson One of the Problems of Everett Anderson
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Hardcover: 32 pages
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR); 1st edition (September 15, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0805052011
ISBN-13: 978-0805052015
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 8.3 x 0.3 inch

A sensitive exploration of a difficult problem by an award winning author/illustrator team.

"One day in school, just out of the blue,"
Everett whispers, "Greg started to cry,
and I went over to ask him why

and he looked up and sighed,
'I can't tell you.'
And he had the saddest, saddest face
like he was lost in the loneliest place."

Everett Anderson doesn't know what to do when his friend Greg comes to school with bruises, or when Greg cries and can't explain what's wrong. Should Everett tell the teacher, or would that only make things worse for Greg? Everett's sister thinks maybe it's none of their business, but he can't stop worrying about his friend. Then, when Everett Anderson tells his mother, he opens a window of possibility.

This tender story perfectly evokes the confusion, concern--and eventual hope--one little boy feels in the face of a very difficult problem.

Quilting: Poems 1987-1990
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Paperback: 89 pages
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.; First edition. edition (September 1, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0918526817
ISBN-13: 978-0918526816
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches

"Clifton mythologizes herself: that is, she illuminates her surroundings and history from within in a way that casts light on much beyond."
—Marilyn Hacker, The Women's Review of Books

eve's version

smooth talker
slides into my dreams
and fills them with apple
apple snug as my breast
in the palm of my hand
apple sleek apple sweet
and bright in my mouth

it is your own lush self

you hunger for

he whispers lucifer

honey-tongue.

Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000
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Paperback: 145 pages
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (April 1, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1880238888
ISBN-13: 978-1880238882
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.4 inches

Winner: 2001 National Book Award

This long-awaited collection by one of the most distinguished poets writing today includes poems written during the past four years as well as generous selections from Lucille Clifton's award-winning collections Next: New Poems, Quilting and The Terrible Stories. Clifton employs brilliantly honed language, stunning images and sharp rhythms to address the whole of human experience. Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not afraid to confront our most salient issues.

"Although her work is often spare and simple, it is always beautifully and painstakingly crafted into poems that tell the truth, poems that insist on residing within the reader, poems by a poet who seeks and achieves the ability to be a vehicle for those who may not otherwise speak."
—Web Del Sol Review of Books

donor

to lex

when they tell me that my body

might reject

i think of thirty years ago

and the hangers i shoved inside

hard trying not to have you.

i think of the pills, the everything

i gathered against your

inconvenient bulge; and you

my stubborn baby child,

hunched there in the dark

refusing my refusal.

suppose my body does say no

to yours. again, again i feel you

buckled in despite me, lex,

fastened to life like the frown

on an angel's brow.

Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980
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Paperback: 276 pages
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (November 1, 1987)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0918526590
ISBN-13: 978-0918526595
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches

"Lucille Clifton is one of the four or five most authentic and profound living American poets. Her ear is fine-tuned to the subtle relationship of verbal music to image and metaphor; and her imagination avails itself of that osmosis by which the mythic is realized in the quotidian, the humble and everyday is illuminated by the spiritual."--Denise Levertov

february 13, 1980

twenty-one years of my life you have been

the lost color in my eye. my secret blindness,

all my seeings turned grey with your going.

mother, i have worn your name like a shield.

it has torn but protected me all these years,

now even your absence comes of age.

i put on a dress called woman for this day

but i am not grown away from you

whatever i say.

the terrible stories the terrible stories
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Paperback: 70 pages
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.; 3rd Printing edition (September 1, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1880238373
ISBN-13: 978-1880238370
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches

In a long career, Clifton has earned that rare combination of critical acclaim (including two Pulitzer Prize nominations) and a wide popular audience. Heir to Langston Hughes's deceptively ordinary voice, Clifton crafts brief lines and accessible metaphors into a profound and often humorous commentary on the rich survival skills of women, family love and contemporary American?particularly African American?life. Her cogent 10th collection charts a treacherous terrain of personal and historic tragedy. She confronts breast cancer with an impressive delicacy, as in "scar":In a long career, Clifton has earned that rare combination of critical acclaim (including two Pulitzer Prize nominations) and a wide popular audience. Heir to Langston Hughes's deceptively ordinary voice, Clifton crafts brief lines and accessible metaphors into a profound and often humorous commentary on the rich survival skills of women, family love and contemporary American?particularly African American?life. Her cogent 10th collection charts a treacherous terrain of personal and historic tragedy. She confronts breast cancer with an impressive delicacy, as in "scar":

"I will call you
ribbon of hunger
and desire
empty pocket flap
edge of before and after.

and you
what will you call me?"

A poetic sequence called "A Term in Memphis" penetrates Southern history, allowing the revelations of honest anger to operate as antidote?not comfort?for bigotry. Often drawn to religious themes, Clifton ambitiously explores contradictions of the Bible's King David, a poet and a soldier who "stands in the tents of history/ bloody skull in one hand, harp in the other...." With her sustaining ability to spin pain into beauty, Clifton redeems the human spirit from its dark moments. She is among our most trustworthy and gifted poets.
—Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.