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 control of the music/poetry of the spoken black language which gives her art a unique power and beauty.

Each brief poem is an individual black voice with its own cadence, pitch, and style communicating its experienced fragment of living black. Through transcribing with complete accuracy the rhythmic patterns, grammatical structures, and subtle tonal nuances of spoken Afro-Americanese, Miss Clifton makes a sensitive ear actually hear each voice. As the reader proceeds, the individual voices swell into the harmonious discord of the timeless black "survival motion set to music"—the collective black experience. (p. 272)

The distinguishing quality of her songs, which infuses all the poems, is a sense of the black woman-poet's strength—the deep, unshakable strength that emanates from her very being, from...