Notes from The Book of Light

Exciting news!  The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton is coming out this fall. Ever since I discovered her work in the early 1990s, Clifton has been a major deity in my poetry pantheon. Denise Levertov said of Clifton's work:

"Poems after poem exhilarates and inspires awe at the manifestation of such artistic and spiritual power."

Even more than Levertov, Clifton could be so compact and succinct.  I don't know of another American poet who uses five and dime words--the vocabulary of the everyday--to build such palaces of language.

thel

          was my first landscape

          red brown as the clay

          of her georgia.

          sweet attic of a woman,

          repository of old songs.

          there was such music in her;

          she would sit, shy as a wren

          humming alone and lonely

          amid broken promises,

          amid the sweet broken bodies

          of birds.


You can see Lucille Clifton read her work here.