SOURCE: "True Names," in American_Book Review, Vol. 10, No. 4, September-October, 1988, p. 7.

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 great deal over the course of her career. In the late 1960s she began as a good poet of the New Black Renaissance, but she was in no way an equal to such accomplished artists of the period as Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, or Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti). Many of her early poems were too simple and easy; however, she stubbornly kept producing books of poems and they have dramatically improved; in fact, her poems have metamorphosed from flat and plain to lyric and textured. Furthermore, with her prose memoir, Generations: A Memoir, she made a quantum leap into a new mature...