SOURCE: Ullman, Leslie. Review of Quilting: Poems, 1987-1990, by Lucille Clifton. Kenyon Review 14, no. 3 (summer 1992): 178-80.

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.

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 (“Catalpa Flower,” “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 empathic...