[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.]

Lucille Clifton is a poet who has grown a great deal over the course of her career. In the late 1960s she began as a good poet of the New Black Renaissance, but she was in no way an equal to such accomplished artists of the period as Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, or Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti). Many of her early poems were too simple and easy; however, she stubbornly kept producing books of poems and they have dramatically improved; in fact, her poems have metamorphosed from flat and plain to lyric and textured. Furthermore, with her prose memoir, Generations: A Memoir, she made a quantum leap into a new mature and powerful style; and happily, the books of poems that followed maintain, for the most part, the same level of excellence. In Generations: A Memoir and Next, her best book of poems to date, we see an artist come into her own, and to watch that transformation is an instructive and joyous occasion for any one devoted to the art of poetry.

Her first book is typical of the black militant 1960s, a period that produced many poets but few with staying power. The typical poem of the time was ethnic in character and political in agenda. The aesthetic of the 1960s forced the black artist to reawaken to a sense of his or her own cultural possibilities, to explore his or her own tradition instead of somebody else's. Unfortunately, integral to the black aesthetic of the time was the desire to denigrate the white tradition. In her first book Clifton wrote the obligatory antiwhitie poem, today as dated as any other cliché or fashionable period piece.

pity this poor animal
who has never gone beyond
the ape herds gathered around the fires of europe

all he knows how to do
is huddle with others
in straight haired grunt clusters
to keep warm

Unlike Baraka, she could not hate with style or lyricism.

In Clifton's second book, good news about the earth, she becomes more self-consciously a woman poet, a black woman poet. One main mission of her poetry is to celebrate and explore the experiences of ordinary black women, including herself and her mother. And ironically, one prime experience of being an ordinary woman is

i had expected more than this.
i had not expected to be
an ordinary woman

Clifton is sincerely committed to communicating to the "brother on the street"—therefore, the language is straight-forward, but unlike Langston Hughes she too often fails to embody profundity in simplicity, and unlike Giovanni she lacks both sassiness and jazzy flavor. Sometimes, however, she does successfully absorb the poetics of the street and achieves complexity in simplicity—especially in such series poems as her character studies of street kids, in the buffalo soldiers poems, and in "listen children," in which she uses the native rhythms and form of a child's game to eloquently make her point:

listen children
keep this in the place
you have for keeping
always
keep it all ways

we have never hated black

listen

we have been ashamed
hopeless tired mad
but always
all ways
we loved us

we have always loved each other
children all ways

pass it on

With the publication of Generations: A Memoir Clifton becomes a poet in prose. She expands her black aesthetic to include language as rich as Shakespeare and the Bible, a language that is as truly representative of black folk as any other. In fact, much of the richness of the tale comes from the poet recreating her father's speech; she has called him a great storyteller. Perhaps, in trying to record and remember his speech she learned the trick of great story-telling. Anyway, within the black literary tradition we find this grand style in Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Morrison, and Baraka, to name a few. Clifton's new work is filled with such lines as "Smoke was hanging over Buffalo like judgment." But to get a real sense of the power of this memoir you must read large sections, which do not lend themselves to short quotation. All the lushness of language and imagery that the reader wanted in the poetry is present in the prose. This little book ranks with such prose classics as Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha—however, it is a much sweeter work since it is about love among generations of black people instead of the complexities of black marriage—and Baraka's modernist masterpiece, The System of Dante's Hell. Clifton declares that the main theme of the book is "The generations of white folks are just people but the generations of colored folks are families."

Two-Headed Woman was the next book published after the memoir. It is ambitious, with a few first-rate poems such as "sonora desert poem." Yet, assuming that the books were published in the order that they were composed, she does not gain full mastery of the poetic medium until her next volume, appropriately called Next. Perhaps the mastery of prose in poetry led to the mastery of poetry in poetry. This book includes such lovely and moving poems as "the death of fred clifton," the cancer poems about her mother, Thelma, and "this is the tale," and there are striking and lyric lines on almost every page except for the last section. The volume abounds with such lines as:

this belief
in the magic of whiteness,
that it is the smooth
pebble in your hand,

Clifton writes an endstopped free verse which needs little punctuation. Over her career she has written basically the same free verse line, but she has become more and more skilled at it, and in recent years the line now bears a denser vocabulary and imagery. As I briefly mentioned before, she writes poems in groups, series poems. In these she takes a poetic idea and develops it over a number of poems. For example, she writes a series of poems about the Bible and another about body parts. The series poems allow her to develop a complicated subject in a simple way—that is, individual poems add up to a complex experience. The prime example of this is the buffalo poems.

In a poem called "the making of poems," she declares:

the reason why i do it
though i fail and fail
in the giving of true names
is i am adam and his mother
and these failures are my job.

This credo, this idea of continuing in the face of failure to name the world, is a heroic anda dignified act and one that has paid off, since Clifton has achieved much in her persistence. This reviewer anxiously awaits Lucille Clifton's next book. She has survived the 1960s and has grown into a mature and impressive poet.