Voices (American Poets Continuum) [Paperback]

Lucille Clifton (Author)

Book Description

Series: American Poets Continuum | Publication Date: November 1, 2008

In 2007, Lucille Clifton became the first African American woman to win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most prestigious American poetry awards and one of the largest literary honors for work in the English language. Clifton has also won the National Book Award in poetry for Blessing the Boats (BOA Editions, 2000), and is the only author ever to have two collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (BOA Editions, 1987) and Next: New Poems (BOA Editions, 1987), named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in one year.

In Voices, Clifton continues her celebrated aesthetic of writing poems for the disempowered and the underprivileged while finding humor and redemption among life’s many hardships. This book also highlights Clifton’s ability to write inventive dramatic monologues. Voices includes monologues spoken by animals, as well as by the food product spokespeople Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the apparently nameless guy on the Cream of Wheat box.

“cream of wheat”

sometimes at night
we stroll the market aisles
ben and jemima and me they
walk in front humming this and that
i lag behind
trying to remove my chef’s cap
wondering what ever pictured me
then left me personless
rastus
i read in an old paper that i was called rastus
but no mother ever
gave that to her son
toward dawn we head back
to our shelves
our boxes ben and jemima and me
we pose and smile i simmer
to myself what is my name

BOA Editions is thrilled to present the newest poetry collection by the one and only Lucille Clifton.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

National Book Award–winner Clifton has long enjoyed national acclaim for her careful, colloquial, compact renditions of African-American voices, in memoirs, books for children and more than a dozen books of poems. This relatively short new collection excels in its opening pages, with wry comic verse in the voices of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and a devout raccoon: oh Master Of All Who Take and Wash/ And Eat lift me away. Cliftons more serious poems, where she speaks as herself, address her late parents, her delights as a grandmother and her mixed feelings about memory and her own body as she begins her eighth decade. A visionary sequence of very brief lyric works, A Meditation on Ten Oxherding Pictures, winds the volume up: i am lucille who masters ox/ ox is the one lucille masters/ hands caution me again/ what can be herded/ is not ox. Where Cliftons earlier poetry sought strength in African-American oral traditions, these poems look even further back, to the origin of writing (where a sketch of an ox became an aleph, then an A). Clifton (Mercy) retains an undeniable sincerity, an openness to her own emotions, and a rare warmth. (Nov.)
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About the Author

Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) was the 2007 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, as well as the 2010 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Her final poetry collection, Voices, was published by BOA in September 2008. She was an award-winning poet, fiction writer, and author of children's books. Her poetry book, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000, won the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry. Two of Clifton's BOA poetry collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, and, Next: New Poems, were chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, the only author ever to have done so, while Clifton's, The Terrible Stories, was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. Clifton received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; the Shelley Memorial Prize; and the Charity Randall Citation. She served as a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College in Maryland. She was appointed a Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected as Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999.

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (November 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934414123
• ISBN-13: 978-1934414125
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #638,143 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars word music, April 6, 2010

By 

Elizabeth Evans "Elizabeth Evans, Author of &... (Southern California) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Voices (American Poets Continuum) (Paperback)

Lucille Clifton's poetry is, indeed, word music, most likely blues or jazz or gospel or any music that speaks to one's uncomplicated soul. The magic of her poetry is in its accessibility to the reader whether one is a lover of poetry or an infrequent visitor to the world of poetry.
There is joy as well as desperate reality in the rhythmic cadences of her carefully selected words. She brings the reader vision and sound from disparate topics,the poems of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben or the Meditation on Ten Oxherding Pictures.
Ms. Clifton was, not only, a National Book Award winner, she was, also, a national treasure.
aka, Elizabeth Evans, author Sanakhou