The following is a telephone interview that took place in 1990 between Rowell and Lorde, who was living in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Lorde discusses the relationship between her roles as poet and member of society. "Being a poet is not merely a question of producing poems, " she states. "Being a poet means that I have a certain way of looking at the world, involving myself in the community around me."

In the essay below, Hull conducts a broad appraisal of the themes and issues Lorde addresses in her poetry.

In the following review, Clausen uses the coinciding occasions of Lorde's death and the publication of Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New (Revised) to conduct a broad survey of Lorde's life and poetry.

In the following review, Parson-Nesbitt traces the development of Lorde's poetry as evidenced by the selections in Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New (Revised).

In the folowing excerpt, Keating argues that Lorde incorporates elements of African myths into her poetry and, in doing so, "reclaims a tradition which has been almost entirely erased by western culture."

In the excerpt below, Chinosole explores the ways in which Lorde's poetry celebrates Black and female differences from the dominant culture as sources of power and self-definition.

In the following essay—which the poet herself described as one of her "core pieces " of expository prose—Lorde characterizes poetry as a "vital necessity" for women: "It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action." This piece was written in 1977.

[Until] the recent awakening of interest in women's achievements [Lorde] seemed destined for an obscurity that rarely enfolds male poets of comparable talents. What is heartening … [is that she has] made fine art out of the experience. (p. 296) Lorde, of course, is an outsider in more ways than one. A black woman poet, living, writing, teaching, and raising children in the gray chaos that New York City has become, she observes and describes the alienation imposed on her by her race, her sex, h...

Some years ago, Randall Jarrell remarked that the best critic who ever lived could not prove that the Iliad is better than "Trees."… [The Black Unicorn] often makes one long for "Trees."… Lorde writes short pieces best viewed under a buzzing fluorescent light. This gray-green diffuseness coldly reveals a world which Sam Pekhinpah might think of filming: a few of the poems are good, many are bad, and most are ugly…. All this ugliness—and there is much m...

[Audre Lorde] risks expressing herself fully in her poems as a woman capable of rage as well as love. From a Land Where Other People Live reveals the poet's growth as a person and a craftswoman. It is, I think, one of those fortunate books that come from a poet's knowing where she stands in her life. Part of its power comes from anger…. Lorde is moved not only by injustice, but by the paradox of her identities, being both black and a woman…. (p. 39)

Misery, impatience, urgings, loneliness, refusals, love, and terror rise from the pages of Audre Lorde's From a Land Where Other People Live…. In Lorde's poems, "elementary forces collide in free fall": she has a freer and less programmatic emphasis than [Sonia] Sanchez or [Don] Lee, though she is no less pained. Her poems express uncertainties about choices and roles, the difficulties and falterings of motherhood and living. (pp. 319-20) Lorde's freedom from norms ...

In her uneven but intermittently powerful new poems, best in their New York reportage ["The New York Head Shop and Museum"], Audre Lorde mixes bitterness, shame, and hope, sometimes in leadenly explicit lines, but often coming alive in rapid anecdotes. She [should] be quoted at length, because her effects at her best are cumulative…. Lorde is much less gifted in her abstractions than in her story-telling, and least happy in the love poems, which run to remarks about "entering her...

In The Black Unicorn, Audre Lorde reaches across 300 years of black diaspora and reclaims African history and mythology as a basis for her imagery about women; and she does so without succumbing to naïve nostalgia or vapid exoticism…. One of the stereotypes of Afro-American women is mammymatriarch, so the poet who writes about black women and children risks cliché. Lorde has consistently and brilliantly met this challenge….

Audre Lorde's The First Cities … is a quiet, introspective book. You first notice the striking phrases: "the crash of passing sun," "a browning laughter," "the oyster world." Then you notice the images, most of them drawn from nature, a source unusual in this age of urban poets who write of concrete and machines. But Audre Lorde is not a nature poet. Her focus is not on nature, but on feelings and relationships. The nature images, many of them pertaini...

Lorde's poems [in Coal] are concerned most often with the mystery and variety of love relationships…. Her poems are often angry and bitter, etched in vitriol on the stark page. (p. 762) But the total impact of the poems is positive. Audre Lorde is secure in the knowledge of her worth as person and poet. Lines from the title poem, "Coal," might stand as an epigraph for the entire volume.

I don't care much for [Audre Lorde's writing in The Black Unicorn], which seems far too close to the commonplace. (One wonders why contemporary Afro-American poets haven't learned more of the real eloquence, tribally based, of their Caribbean and African colleagues, especially those who write in French.) Yet few poets are better equipped than Lorde to drive their passion through the gauzy softness of commonplace diction and prosody. One can't help being absorbed in it. Her best p...