Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-20 (American Poets Continuum) [Hardcover]

Lucille Clifton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2000 | Series: American Poets Continuum (Book 59)

The long-awaited collection by one of the most distinguished poets working today.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Clifton's poems owe a great deal to oral tradition. Her work is wonderfully musical and benefits greatly from being read aloud: "It is hard to remain human on a day/ when birds perch weeping/ in the trees and the squirrel eyes/ do not look away but the dog ones do/ in pity." Her keen sense of rhythm, of the sound, tone, and texture of words, is delightful, a rare find in this day and age. The language is crystal clear and deceptively accessible. The poems are personal, but the distant thunder of history rumbles behind every line. As she says on seeing a photograph: "is it the cut glass/ of their eyes/ looking up toward/ the new gnarled branch/ of the black man/ hanging from a tree?" Clifton's work hearkens back to the days of the Black Arts Movement and sheds light on the new black aesthetic. These are economical slices of ordinary life, celebrations, if you will, of African American existence. With simple language and common sense, she writes of grace, character, and race by way of the personal and familiar. Clifton's voice, her unique vision and wisdom, make this book essential for any serious poetry collection.
-Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Birds and foxes appear in Clifton's poems, and it's easy to see why their quicksilver energy and grace, their bright knowingness and oneness with the earth, appeal to her: when she puts pen to paper, she is their sister. Clifton's poems are lean, agile, and accurate, and there is beauty in their directness and efficiency, an element, too, of surprise. New poems set this powerful volume in motion, and just like her much-praised earlier work, they address the tragic and the inexplicable. Clifton writes about children killing children, a father abusing a daughter, white men killing black men, and other confounding forms of madness. She ponders mysteries both immediate and theological, including cancer's voraciousness, banishment from the Garden of Eden, and Lazarus' return to the land of the living, and she approaches them with pleasing matter-of-factness. Clifton is valiant and curious, saddened but seasoned. There is strength in these spare yet musical poems, and faith in the power of expression. Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 145 pages
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.; 1st edition (April 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 188023887X
• ISBN-13: 978-1880238875
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,260,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Poetry does not exist to make you comfortable, April 16, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-20 (American Poets Continuum) (Hardcover)

I feel compelled to respond to the person who found the opening poem "racist" because the speaker says "another child has killed a child / and i catch myself relieved that they are / white."

First of all, the fact that a poem depicts a certain attitude or feeling does not mean that the poet endorses that attitude or feeling. In this case, the sentiment is honest even if it is not morally admirable. Poetry does not always depict life or human nature as we would like them to be, but rather as they are.

Second, the last line of the poem says "these too are your children this too is your child." So the poem has corrected the speaker's own withdrawal from the scene. It ends, I think, with a rejection of racism...but it could be a good poem even if it did not.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a wonderful book!, November 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-20 (American Poets Continuum) (Hardcover)

congratulations to Lucille Clifton for her latest book of poems and for winning the National Book Award. These poems not only inspire but comfort...

4.0 out of 5 stars Dreamy Whirl Through Life Nuances, November 6, 2007

By 

Sundiata "Sekou" (Clinton, Md.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-20 (American Poets Continuum) (Hardcover)

Blessing the Boats, New and Selected Poems 1988-2000, Lucille Clifton, BOA, Ltd., Rochester, NY 2000), 132 pp, offers a often dreamy whirl through nuances of life to include lustful desires of the sex, battles with breast cancer, death of a loved one, menopause, oppression and more. Her poems are feminine in perspective, but probably universally applauded. She doesn't insults. They read like surreal episodes from a dream, having fleeting scenes change in time and place in nanosecond flashes. Words. Words are bended and hammered into concepts seen alien, yet fitting. For example, how does one "hear the bright train eye...?" What the hell is the bright train eye? But in the context of " birthday 1999," not only does it fit, it's clear and above all, enlightening. The same cannot be said for all of Clifton poems. So of them includes miscues that makes them not so clear.

Boats is partitioned into four parts, New Poems (2000), From Guilty (1991), From the Book of Light (1993) and From the Terrible Stories (1996).

new poems:
In "moonchild," the author, deals with child sex abuse by a father, but rather than make the reader feel the pain, and anguish towards men, instead she attempts to share she has learned to cope with the memory to minimize, rather than maximize continued pain and suffering.

"the photograph: a lynching," in her poem on "a picture is worth a thousand words," she proves the same can be said for her poem. She describes the stark history of a lynching, and focuses on the stunned witness of the eyes of the children. She questions the whether other kids, black and white, upon seeing the photograph will be taught accurately what happened there or will the story be misinterpreted or discarded altogether.

"jasper texas 1998 for j. byrd" is as plain as it is powerful. The narrator asks, who's inhuman, the dragged or the draggers, clearly knowing the answer -- for the victim was dragged to death, involuntarily. But, so was Rodney King's beating, although some believed that he was in control throughout the ordeal. She concludes that deposits that if singing, "We Shall Overcome" is all we going to do about oppression, then we can expect more of the same.

In "alabama 9/15/63," the narrator feels so much for the 4 little black girls will go to heaven, but even that vision is obscured by the memory of a church bombing them to smithereens.

"Praise song," illustrates the warmth of unconditional love, the idea of welcoming a family member back home against their frailties, even when they appear to have lost their mind.

from quilting:
In "birth of language," we see the proverbial Adam shuddering to whisper, "Eve," which is excellent, loaded imagery, given what would be come the most dynamic relationship known to man. His shuddering was fitting.

"sleeping beauty" is funny and typical of the male-female dynamic - she comes out of a sleep and the first thing she notices is man, "and she blamed him."

book of light:
"women you are accustomed to," Clifton extols egalitarian gender values: she wants to be the women her man has been accustomed to, because misses his "dancing tongue."

"song at midnight," the poet depicts the loneliness of an unattractive woman, as she extols, love this woman who needs love because if the Black man doesn't, who else will?

"the earth is a living thing," personifies earth as a "black and living thing...in its kinky hair."

There are a series of poems that use the metaphor of "superman" and "clark kent," to reveal issues of romance where the expectation is that men have superman powers even though there's no reference to narrator personified as the fabled "Lois."

from the terrible stories:
"fox" poems are many in which the narrator personifies a fox, fearful of the terrible stories it must tell. These poems are the sex chronicles of a woman lacking and yearning for sex, not necessarily romance.

Like "leaving fox," in desperation, the narrator drops her guards totally, leaving herself open to all kinds of pain to get the sex she craves. "keep the door unlocked until something human comes in." She knows she's exposes her vulnerabilities to the worse that may come in, but she has accepted it apart of her fulfillment.

In "one year later," the narrator ponders what if she yields to her vixen desires, but pre-empts the thought with fear of what will follow -- how ill it change or impact her life, her home, her poetry?

"a dream of foxes," the narrator supposes what if women could pursue their vixen dreams without the fear of consequences.

In `amazons," the narrator returns to other issues, such as breast cancer, mastectomy, and more. She had inherited the breast cancer gene from generations of women before her. But, fortunately, there was only a scare, due to early detection.

`slaveships" she asks why did God not protect all from the inhuman hypocrites who enslaved her people in the name of God. She questions whether the sins can go on.

In "memory," narrator recalls a childhood stripped of oppression's shadow, so she will feel like she's done a good job of protecting her child's childhood.

A few poems from Boats escaped my level of sophistication. For example, "white lady," the narrator cries to cocaine to give her a ransom so she may have her kids back. - cocaine will only tell her to make her kids depend more. I thought those well taken pleas could be better be directed at the government, white supremacy, or the dealers, but not cocaine.

And, in "poem in praise of menstruation," Clifton uses metaphors that are astounding in that they sound so right even though unless you're in a dream state, they really don't make sense. For example, uses a simile of "blood red edge of the moon" - the moon isn't red at all. A better simile might have been the sun. Or, it could be something I'm not getting because I am a man. Perhaps that is her point, during that period, excuse the pun, the sun, the moon, they're all the same.

Using a prose style, Clifton's words are defined not by Webster but by the context in which she uses them. Her words often take flight from when we've known them to some far off place where she's taking us.