In the following interview, originally conducted on August 2, 1998, Clifton discusses the themes of African-American ancestry and identity in her poetry.

In the following essay, Wall examines Clifton's exploration of the past through the reconstruction of family genealogy in Generations.

In the following essay, Hull explores the spiritual connection to African-American female ancestors in the poetry of Clifton and Dolores Kendrick.

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.

In the following essay, Whitley compares Clifton's Generations to Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself” in the context of the American literary tradition.

Here poet and critic Ostriker calls Clifton a minimalist artist whose small poems encompass grand themes.

In the following essay, White observes how Clifton's poetry can function as a rhetorical discourse on African-American identity.

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 identity.

Here, Rushing examines Clifton's relationship to the Black Arts Movement and comments on Clifton's poetic representation of women.

In the following essay, poet, critic, and educator Madhubuti discusses the language and cultural sensitivity of Clifton's poetry

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.

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.

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.

In the following essay, Anaporte-Easton examines the thematic focus on Christianity and African-American culture in the poetry of Clifton and Judith Johnson.

In the essay below, Anaporte-Easton cites Clifton's thematic healing of the disparity between the mind, spirit, and the body.

Here, Clifton describes her views of her role in society and the ideology and methods behind her poetry

In the following review of Quilting: Poems, 1987-1990, Bennett examines the central themes of each of the work's five sections.

Below, poet and critic Bennett discusses Clifton's thematic exploration of cultural and personal history in Quilting: Poems 1987-90.

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's life and works.

In the follow review of Two-Headed woman, Orloff believes that Clifton's theme of spiritual unity is the unifying force of her work.

Below, poet and critic Waniek reviews the visionary and transcendent nature of Clifton's poems in Two-Headed Woman.

Poet and critic Marilyn Hacker calls Clifton's style in Next one of astonishing economy and her theme one of asserting the connecting spirit.

Below, Rosenberg sees Clifton as a storyteller whose work is rooted in her own personal history

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 unflinching” vision.

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 records the riddle of the ordinary with deliberate irony. In the first poem in the book, "In Salem," the "black witches know" that terror is not in weird phases of the moon or the witches' broom or the "wild clock face":      the terror is in the plain ...

Earnshaw praises Clifton's constancy in speaking victoriously for downtrodden people.

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 to...

In the following review of Good News about the Earth, Mills discusses Clifton's work as a poetry of reality and of affirmation.

Here, poet and critic David Kirby applauds the humanity of Clifton's poetry in The Book of Light.

[With "Generations" Lucille Clifton has] produced a short but eloquent eulogy of her parents. As with most elegists, her purpose is perpetuation and celebration, not judgment. There is no attempt to see either parent whole; no attempt at the recovery of history not witnessed by or told to the author. There is no sustained chronological narrative. Instead, clusters of brief anecdote gather round two poles, the deaths of father and mother…. First, her father…. His daughter's...

"Love," "grace," "mystery," "survive," "strong," "good" and "wise"—these almost ineffectual words blur too much of Lucille Clifton's new book with the endearing title "An Ordinary Woman"; but when this "ordinary woman" turns to Kali, who presides over the bloodier poems, the words rise and tug at their subjects…. Clifton's poems on herself and her mother a...

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 that sets the tone of a lyric poet confident of her own time and place. Referring to the Kent State tragedy: "… only to keep / his little fear / he kills his cities / and his trees / even his children oh / people / white ways are / the way of death / come into the / Black / and live." I emphasize the word "lyric�...

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 any sort of artificiality. Donald Hall has recently said that black poetry is "a poetry of reality", "of character, attending to qualities like courage, defiance and tenderness", and his words could find no better illustration than the work of Lucille Clifton. She focuses on the events of the day, the killings at Kent Stat...

[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 must holler. This woman … this poet … knows Something Other. Something like a whole and crafted Blackself. Each section of history (Heroes), today (Abt the Earth), and myth (Some Jesus) is as real and profound as the other.

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-American heritage, Miss Clifton is one of the few for whom oral history has preserved a record of African descent. Her family traces its line back to the brave, unflinching "Mammy Ca'line … born among the Dahomey people in 1822." With controlled irony, she tells the tale of slavery as though it were part of a family album…. Thr...

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 instinct of pride and place among blacks uprooted out of Dahomey and transplanted into urban disruption. Mrs. Clifton's poems about childhood seem airbrushed, retouched with bonuses of imaginative perception…. Mrs. Clifton is gifted with a sense of humanity, an instinct for consolation that overrides a cynicism. She needs now only...