SOURCE: A review of Quilting: Poems 1987-1990, in The Kenyon Review, Vol. XIV, No. 3, Summer, 1992, pp. 178-80.

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 seventh collection [Quilting: Poems 1987-1990] offers a poet who lives multiple lives and is of multiple, often contradictory minds, as an African-American and a woman living the "inexplicable life" of a poet. The book's title and its sections named after quilt patterns ("CatalpaFlower," "Eight-pointed Star," "Tree of Life") supply a visual metaphor for the vibrant wholeness of vision the book achieves through its many patterns of speech and points of focus, but "quilting" is not a necessary device for making it all work. Clifton's vision, as we have come to know it in her earlier work as well, is large, diffuse, and sensual, always empathie, and...