the terrible stories

January 1, 1996
In a long career, Clifton has earned that rare combination of critical acclaim (including two Pulitzer Prize nominations) and a wide popular audience. Heir to Langston Hughes's deceptively ordinary voice, Clifton crafts brief lines and accessible metaphors into a profound and often humorous commentary on the rich survival skills of women, family love and contemporary American--particularly African American--life. Her cogent 10th collection charts a treacherous terrain of personal and historic tragedy. She confronts breast cancer with an impressive delicacy, as in "scar": "I will call you/ ribbon of hunger/ and desire/ empty pocket flap/ edge of before and after.// and you/ what will you call me?" A poetic sequence called "A Term in Memphis" penetrates Southern history, allowing the revelations of honest anger to operate as antidote--not comfort--for bigotry. Often drawn to religious themes, Clifton ambitiously explores contradictions of the Bible's King David, a poet and a soldier who "stands in the tents of history/ bloody skull in one hand, harp in the other...." With her sustaining ability to spin pain into beauty, Clifton redeems the human spirit from its dark moments. She is among our most trustworthy and gifted poets.

August 1, 1996
What fine, sharp tools Clifton has forged! Lean lines, often unpunctuated; stark, direct language; no capitalization; internal spacing that opens up the caesuras; rock-hard metaphors and fluid abstractions. In this ravishing collection, she puts all these to use in self-revealing poems that never descend into confessionalism. Most powerfully moving are the poems about cancer and mastectomy: "what is the splendor of one breast / on one woman?" she asks, "if there are no cherry blossoms / can there be a cherry tree?" Another sequence, of shamanic poems about a fox who is the poet's animal self, is almost as powerful. This is Clifton at the top of her marvelous form. ((Reviewed Aug. 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)