The writer Clarence Major once noted that black American poetry is almost always, in some sense, a reaction to slavery—and therefore often concerns itself with the right to Being. Lucille Clifton is a poet who grapples mightily with such questions. Her poetry is direct and clear: full of humor and forthrightness, tenderness and anger. She has no sentimental hankering after the past: "'Oh slavery, slavery,' my Daddy would say. 'It ain't something in a book, Lue. Even the good parts was awful.'"

Her work is grounded in her own personal history, revealed most beautifully in the long memoir at the end of Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir. A sure sense of self reverberates throughout her poetry….

Ms. Clifton resists, undermines myths of hierarchy, placement, entitlement (many of her poems are untitled), privilege—hers is a poetry of democracy, full of jumpy and lovely music:

say skinny manysided tall on the ball
brown downtown woman
last time i saw you was on the corner of
pyramid and sphinx.

She is a storyteller, as is clear throughout Good Woman.

… I was in the kitchen washing dishes and all of a sudden I heard my Mama start screaming and fall down on the floor and I ran into the room and she was rolling on the floor and Daddy hadn't touched her, she had just started screaming and rolling on the floor. 'What have you done to her,' I hollered. Then 'What should I do, what should I do?' And Daddy said I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, she's crazy,' and went out. When he left, Mama lay still, and then sat up and leaned on me and whispered, 'Lue, I'm just tired, I'm just tired.'

All of Ms. Clifton's best work falls into this space between comedy and tragedy—even melodrama. Her concerns are both earthbound and mystical, and what may appear stylistically simple is, upon close examination, an effort to free the true voice clear and plain. BOA Editions has simultaneously issued a book of her most recent poetry, Next. The poems here are about death and loss, in which: "the one in the next bed is dying. / mother we are all next, or next." The loss is not only personal, but spreads outward:

it is late
in white america.
i stand
in the light of the
7-11
looking out toward
the church
and for a moment only
i feel the reverberation
of myself
in white america
a black cat
in the belfry
hanging
and
ringing.

Ms. Clifton's poetry is big enough to accommodate sorrow and madness and yet her vision emerges as overwhelmingly joyous and calm:

Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept. 'We come out of it better than they did, Lue,' my Daddy said, and I watch my six children and know we did. They walk with confidence through the world, free sons and daughters of free folk, for my Mama told me that slavery was a temporary thing, mostly we was free and she was right.