Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, Lucille Clifton. Boa, 1987.
Vintage softcover. No markings. Near fine condition.
American poet Lucille Clifton was a writer, poet, and educator from New York. From 1979 to 1985 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. Clifton's work focused on the Black experience, family life, and emphasized strength through adversity. She was the first writer to have two poetry books nominated as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Bruce Bennett of the NYT Book Review praised her 1991 poetry collection Quilting, stating she is a “passionate, mercurial writer, by turns angry, prophetic, compassionate, shrewd, sensuous, vulnerable and funny… The movement and effect of the whole book communicate the sense of a journey through which the poet achieves and understanding of something new”. Poet Rita Dove has written of Clifton’s work: “In contrast to much of the poetry being written today—intellectualized lyricism characterized by an application of inductive thought to unusual images—Lucille Clifton’s poems are compact and self-sufficient...Her revelations then resemble the epiphanies of childhood and early adolescence, when one’s lack of preconceptions about the self allowed for brilliant slippage into the metaphysical, a glimpse into an egoless, utterly thingful and serene world.” (The Poetry Foundation, Poets.org)