"The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010"
may be the most important book of poetry to appear in
years."--"Publishers Weekly""All poetry readers will want
to own this book; almost everything is in it."--"Publishers
Weekly""If you only read one poetry book in 2012, "The Collected
Poems of Lucille Clifton" ought to be it."-NPR "The 'Collected
Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--"The
Washington Post""The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton--both the
woman and her poetry--is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most
frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of
racial pride, courage, steadfastness."--Toni Morrison, from the Foreword "The
Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010" combines all eleven of
Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously
unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a
collection-in-progress titled "the book of days" (2008), and a
poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel
Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet
Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive
statement about this major America poet's career. On February 13, 2010, the
poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of
Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African
American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honouring a US
poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary
recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for
lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. "mother-tongue:
to man-kind" (from the unpublished "the book of days"):
"all that I am asking is that you see me as something more than a common
occurrence, more than a woman in her ordinary skin." Nominee for the 2013
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for poetry.