Wild Blessings―The Poetry of Lucille Clifton

Widely acclaimed for her powerful explorations of race, womanhood, spirituality, and mortality, poet Lucille Clifton has published ten volumes of poems since 1969 and has received numerous accolades for her work, including the 2000 National Book Award for Blessing the Boats. The bursts of joy found in her polished, elegant lines are frequently set against a backdrop of regret and sorrow. Alternately consoling, stimulating, and emotionally devastating, Clifton's poems are unforgettable. In Wild Blessings, Hilary Holladay offers the first full-length study of Clifton's poetry, drawing on a broad knowledge of the American poetry tradition and African American poetry in particular. Holladay places Clifton's poems in multiple contexts--personal, political, and literary--as she explicates major themes and analyzes specific works: Clifton's fertility poems, which are provocatively compared with Sylvia Plath's poems on the same subject; her relation to the Black Arts Movement and to other black female poets, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez; her biblical poems; her elegies; and her poignant family history, Generations, an extended prose poem. This illuminating book concludes with a wide-ranging interview with Clifton, in which she discusses her poetry and private life. Readers encountering Lucille Clifton's poems for the first time and those long familiar with her distinctive voice will benefit from Hilary Holladay's perceptive and striking insights into the work of a leading American poet.

Hilary Holladay is the author of American Hipster: A Life of Herbert Huncke, The Times Square Hustler Who Inspired the Beat Movement; Ann Petry; and the poetry collection The Dreams of Mary Rowlandson. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.