Like all the other contemporary African-American women poets, Clifton was deeply affected by the Black Arts movement of the sixties and seventies. Although subsequent experiences like the women's movement and her own heightened religious consciousness have also left their imprint on her, we must consider that soul-changing crusade the crucible which most searingly shaped her art.

A concomitant of the separatist Black Power campaign, the Black Arts movement enlisted such cultural workers as musicians, visual artists, and writers to addressthe masses of African-Americans about the liberation struggles which confronted them. Propelled by slogans like "I'm Black and I'm proud" and "Black is beautiful," artists pronounced European and Euro-American critical norms inadequate yardsticks for African-American creations and viewed African-American arts as cultural tools with which to destroy three centuries of racial oppression and degradation.

While many bourgeois Euro-American and African-American readers and critics deplored the rage, obscenity, and violence of "New Breed" poetry, respected African-American critics like Bernard Bell, Hoyt Fuller, Addison Gayle, and George Kent recognized its merits. More importantly, young African-Americans in pool rooms and bars (as well as on street corners and college campuses) read it attentively and imitated it widely…. According to [Stephen Henderson in his essay "Understanding the New Black Poetry"] both oral and written African-American poetry clusters around the motif of political, sexual, and spiritual liberation. In analyzing structure, Henderson terms it the poetry's reflection of spoken language and performed music. "Whenever Black poetry is most distinctively and effectively Black, it derives its form from … Black speech and Black music." Saturation is Henderson's rubric for "the communication of Blackness in a given situation and the sense of fidelity to the observed and intuited truth of the Black Experience."

Clifton's early verse clearly indicates the influence of the Black Arts movement. In accord with its dictates about how poetry should raise the cultural and political consciousness of "the Black community," Clifton dedicates Good News About the Earth to those killed in student uprisings at Orangeburg, South Carolina, and Jackson, Mississippi. It contains an apology to the militant Black Panther Party.

i became a woman
during the old prayers
among the ones who wore
bleaching cream to bed
and all my lessons stayed
i was obedient
but brothers i thank you
for these mannish days
i remember agin the wise one
old and telling of suicides
refusing to be slaves
i had forgotten and
brothers i thank you
i praise you
i grieve my whiteful ways

The volume also features verse to Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale. In addition to treating these political subjects, Clifton mirrors the tenets of the Black Arts movement by directing herself to a general African-American audience using the grammar, vocabulary, and rhythm of idiomatic African-American speech. Interestingly, none of Clifton's verse on these vivid figures parallels so many of the tributes to them in relying on typographical quirks, like capitalized words and slashes, or haranguing either African-American or Euro-American readers.

In light of Clifton's later poetry, it is crucial to indicate the ways in which her early work diverges from the creations of her contemporaries. Many of the women poets who came to prominence during the sixties and seventies shocked readers. Despite their slight stature and (in a few cases) bourgeois upbringing, they mirrored the strident stance, profane language, and violent imagery of urban, male poetry. Part of my interest in Clifton's lyrical verse arises from my admiration for the acumen with which she found her own voice during a turbulent period when so many poets sounded the same chords of outrage and militancy. Rather than merely imitating the sarcasm and fury of male poets, Clifton anticipated the concern with women's issues which is—like opposition to the war in Vietnam, support of homosexuals' rights, and the crusade for environmental protection—in deep, though often unacknowledged, debt to the strategies and moral vision of the Civil Rights and Black Power campaigns. Furthermore, while other poets have tended to focus on historical figures such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Malcolm X, Clifton anticipated Alex Haley's Roots in personalizing history and using her own natal family as a symbol of the anguish and triumph of the African-American experience. Moreover, in an era when many African-American nationalists were harshly critical of their accommodating "Uncle Tom" and "Aunt Jemima" elders, the "opiate" of African-American Christianity, and the Anglo-Saxon proper names which are a living legacy of chattel slavery and cultural assimilation, Clifton wrote in a different key. While others complained of their elders' failures, she celebrated her ancestors, while others converted to Islam, she wrote about the life-giving power of African-American religion; and, though others assumed African and Arabic names, Clifton justified her own.

light
on my mother's tongue
breaks through her soft
extravagant hip
into life.
Lucille
she calls the light,
which was the name
of the grandmother
who waited by the crossroads
in Virginia
and shot the whiteman off his horse,
…..
mine already is
an Afrikan name.

Beginning with an allusion to the origins of the name "Lucille" in the Latin for "bright light," Clifton goes on to affirm a throbbing connection between Africa, the slave experience, and her own twentieth-century life.

Despite the considerable achievements of Good Times, Good News About the Earth, and Generations, it is with the publication of An Ordinary Woman and Two-Headed Woman that Clifton strides to center stage among contemporary African-American poets. These two fine collections parse the female sector of African-American life and give vivid testimony to the terse brilliance which alerted readers of her early work to Clifton's enormous potential. Not only do they explore a broad swath of rarely examined experience; they do so in an appealing personal voice with an attractive infusion of self-revelation and wit. By now, all the major contemporary African-American women poets have written verse about women's lives: the mother-daughter dyad, heterosexual relations, oppressive standards of female beauty, and loneliness are common themes. The verse is often autobiographical, its saturation in African and African-American culture is explicit, and its tone varies from aggrieved to nostalgic to exultant. Several things set Clifton's work apart from the strophes of others. First, she has written more poems about women's lives than any other African-American poet except Gwendolyn Brooks. Second, she has consistently done so in the African-American demotic with sinewy diction, a confiding voice, and stark imagery.

With the Kali poems in An Ordinary Woman, Clifton makes a bold innovation in poetic presentation of African-American women. Rather than limning heroic embodiments of female power and triumph, or depicting lifelike women victimized by parents, racism, poverty, and sexism, Clifton invokes an aboriginal ebony-faced Indian goddess associated with blood, violence, and murder. Since the paternal slave ancestor Clifton celebrates in her memoir,Generations, came from Dahomey, with its well-known tradition of heroic women, Clifton could have crafted poems around an African-based tradition. In turning to Kali, however, she frees herself from the feminist tendency to see women as hapless victims and explores the psychic tensions of an introspective modern woman negotiating the dramatic changes in contemporary attitudes about culture, race, and gender at the same time that she juggles the roles of daughter, sister, artist, wife, and mother. Written in standard English, these lyrics differ from Clifton's earlier work in syntax and diction; they are also tighter and more forceful. Like her earlier work, however, they also employ short lines, few rhymes, brief stanzas, and recurring images of women's blood and bones. The three Kali poems are striking enough to be quoted at length.

Kali

queen of fatality, she
determines the destiny
of things. nemesis.
the permanent guest
within ourselves.
woman of warfare,

of the chase, bitch
of blood sacrifice and death.
dread mother. the mystery
ever present in us and
outside us. the
terrible Hindu Woman God
Kali.
who is Black.

The Coming of Kali

it is the Black God, Kali,
a woman God and terrible
with her skulls and breasts.
i am one side of your skin,
she sings, softness is the other,
you know you know me well, she sings,
you know you know me well.

Calming Kali

be quiet awful woman,
lonely as hell,
and i will comfort you
when i can
and give you my bones
and my blood to feed on.
gently gently now
awful woman,
i know i am your sister.

In these poems, Clifton juxtaposes archetypal imagery aboutfemale generative and destructive power and insists on the tense mystery implicit in that union of opposites. Furthermore, she combines awe about Kali's violence and power with a fierce, almost protective, tenderness toward the fearful figure she refers to as "sister."

The thematic connections between Two-Headed Woman and Clifton's previous verse are immediately apparent. The opening "homage to mine" sectiondemonstrates her continuing attention to family and friends and religious themes. In other ways, however, Clifton's latest volume of verse marks some sort of threshold experience for her. Unlike most other African-American women poets of thesixties and seventies, Clifton's marriage has been stable, and she has had six children. None of her verse articulates either the strains between men and women or the loneliness which often characterizes the work of other female poets, and her sons and daughters have been sources of pleasure and affirmation for her. A pivotal poem in Two-Headed Woman indicates new timbres in her life.

the light that came to lucille clifton came in a shift of knowing when even her fondest sureties faded away. it was the summer she understood that she had not understood and was not mistress even of her own off eye. then the man escaped throwingaway his tie and she could see the peril of an unexamined life.

Here the poet's children grow up, her husband "escapes," and (despite all the introspective verse she has written) she terms her life "unexamined." One indication of the difference between the texture of An Ordinary Woman and Two-Headed Woman is that while the former invokes Kali to personify the furious tensions between women's creative and destructive powers, the latter concentrates on the smaller (though equally intense) landscape of one woman's searching psyche.

see the sensational
two-headed woman
one face turned outward
one face
swiveling slowly in.

Another indication of the difference appears in the religious verse in the volume. On the one hand, Clifton uses a lower-class Caribbean accent rather than the African-American idiom in which she usually writes. On the other, she concentrates onthe near ineffability of the interface between divine call andhuman response. Many of her religious poems are about Mary. Rather than depicting her as the wise poised figure of Renaissance painting, Clifton portrays her as an uneducated young girl inexplicably chosen for miraculous experience….

holy night

Joseph, i afraid of stars,
their brilliant seeing.
so many eyes, such light.
Joseph, i cannot still these limbs,
i hands keep moving toward i breasts,
so many stars, so bright.

Clifton's focus on Mary not only reflects her heightened concern with extraordinary religious experience but also resonates with the emphasis on motherhood which has characterized poetry about her family.

One comes away from Clifton's powerful recent verse knowing that while it shares its lyric qualities, lucidity, and compression with her earlier work, it also marks significantsteps beyond her past achievements. Using many of the same tools which molded the stanzas of Good Times and Good News About the Earth and maintaining her interest in female experience, Clifton has broadened her range anddeepended her perspective.