Lucille Clifton's pride in being black and in being a woman helps her transform difficult circumstances into a qualified affirmation about the black urban world she portrays. She perceives in her own ...
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Thelma Lucille Sayles Clifton was born in Depew, New York, on 27 June 1936 and was educated at Fredonia State Teachers College, Fredonia, New York, and at Howard University, Washington, D.C. She began...
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In the following review of Good News about the Earth, Mills discusses Clifton's work as a poetry of reality and of affirmation.
Those who found Lucille Clifton's Good Times an amazing vo...
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Below, Rosenberg sees Clifton as a storyteller whose work is rooted in her own personal history
The writer Clarence Major once noted that black American poetry is almost always, in some sense, a react...
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Below, poet and critic Bennett discusses Clifton's thematic exploration of cultural and personal history in Quilting: Poems 1987-90.
Readers familiar with Ms. Clifton will find in Quilting, her...
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Critic and poet Ollman discusses how Clifton's poems in Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 echo the speech patterns of African-American idioms, folk songs, and spirituals.
Lucille Clifton's seven...
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Here, poet and critic David Kirby applauds the humanity of Clifton's poetry in The Book of Light.
Ms. Clifton finds beauty in actual people and places. In "thel" (uncapitalized, l...
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Here poet and critic Ostriker calls Clifton a minimalist artist whose small poems encompass grand themes.
Lucille Clifton's writing is deceptively simple. The poems are short, unrhymed, the lin...
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In the essay below, Anaporte-Easton cites Clifton's thematic healing of the disparity between the mind, spirit, and the body.
The distinctive quality of Clifton's voice comes from her ab...
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In the follow review of Two-Headed woman, Orloff believes that Clifton's theme of spiritual unity is the unifying force of her work.
in this gardengrowingfollowing strict ordersfollowing the L...
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Below, poet and critic Waniek reviews the visionary and transcendent nature of Clifton's poems in Two-Headed Woman.
Lucille Clifton is a visionary poet. Her vision, however, is one of sanity, c...
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Here, Clifton describes her views of her role in society and the ideology and methods behind her poetry
I write the way I write because I am the kind of person that I am. My styles and content stem fr...
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In the following essay, poet, critic, and educator Madhubuti discusses the language and cultural sensitivity of Clifton's poetry
In everything she creates, this Lucille Clifton, a writer of no ...
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Here, Rushing examines Clifton's relationship to the Black Arts Movement and comments on Clifton's poetic representation of women.
Like all the other contemporary African-American women ...
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Poet and critic Marilyn Hacker calls Clifton's style in Next one of astonishing economy and her theme one of asserting the connecting spirit.
Lucille Clifton's sixth book, Next, has been...
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Earnshaw praises Clifton's constancy in speaking victoriously for downtrodden people.
Like Nelly Sachs, whose O the Chimneys won a Nobel Prize for the German poet, Lucille Clifton arose from dr...
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In the following review of Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, critic William Harris discusses the lyrical and textured style of Clifton's work.
Lucille Clifton is a poet who has grown a ...
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Critical Essay by Ramona Weeks
In a slim volume entitled Good Times … a poet steeped in the black experience, Lucille Clifton, applauds the strength of the Negro woman that has preserved an ins...
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Critical Essay by Ann Cathey Carver
Lucille Clifton's Good Times poems communicate a microcosm of the black experience in America in all its complexity. And it is Miss Clifton's perfect ...
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Critical Essay by Norman Rosten
Good News About the Earth is by a black poet, Lucille Clifton, whose urban world is a mini-Vietnam—a landscape of inner desolation. The book opens with a credo t...
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Critical Essay by Angela Jackson
[The poems in Good News About The Earth] makes a sister want to give witness…. [At] some or several points in the god/spell according to Sister Lucille any body...
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Critical Essay by Ralph J. Mills, Jr.
Here [in Good News About the Earth] is Mrs. Clifton's deft, economical, poised lyricism moving with the directness of finely turned speech yet eschewing an...
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Critical Essay by Reynolds Price
[With "Generations" Lucille Clifton has] produced a short but eloquent eulogy of her parents. As with most elegists, her purpose is perpetuation and cele...
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Critical Essay by Carol Muske
Lucille Clifton, in her third collection of poems, An Ordinary Woman, plays on [a] collective sense of déjà vu, by using the power of everyday objects. She ...
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Critical Essay by The Virginia Quarterly Review
Generations is more than an elegy or a personal memoir. It is an attempt on the part of one woman to retrieve, and lyrically to celebrate, her Afro-Amer...
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In the following essay, Johnson argues that Clifton's Everett Anderson series of books for young readers functions as a thoughtful exploration of African-American community, culture, and identi...
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In the following review of Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000, Balbo calls Clifton “an American artist of the highest order” and praises her “generous and unfli...
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In the following essay, Whitley compares Clifton's Generations to Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself” in the context of the American literary tradition.
Poet Lucille Clifton re...
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In the following excerpt, Pohl comments on the significance of Clifton's poetry in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and highlights Clifton'...
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In the following review of Quilting: Poems, 1987-1990, Bennett examines the central themes of each of the work's five sections.
Readers familiar with Ms. Clifton will find in Quilting, her seve...
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In the following review, Ullman discusses how Clifton's poems in Quilting: Poems, 1987-1990 echo the speech patterns of African-American idioms, folk songs, and spirituals.
Lucille Clifton�...
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In the following essay, Anaporte-Easton examines the thematic focus on Christianity and African-American culture in the poetry of Clifton and Judith Johnson.
The distinctive quality of Clifton'...
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In the following essay, Hull explores the spiritual connection to African-American female ancestors in the poetry of Clifton and Dolores Kendrick.
Narrative One
One afternoon in 1975, Lucille Clifton ...
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In the following essay, White observes how Clifton's poetry can function as a rhetorical discourse on African-American identity.
And I could tell you about things we been through, some awful on...
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In the following interview, originally conducted on August 2, 1998, Clifton discusses the themes of African-American ancestry and identity in her poetry.
This interview was conducted August 2, 1998, b...
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In the following essay, Wall examines Clifton's exploration of the past through the reconstruction of family genealogy in Generations.
in populated air our ancestors continue i have seen them. ...
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In the following interview, originally conducted in 1999, Clifton discusses her creative process, the role of writing in her life, and her approach to the teaching of creative writing.
The following c...
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(Thelma) Lucille Clifton
