Blessing The Boats
- Published: 2 March 2023
- ISBN: 9781802061376
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 128
Seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude
Toni Morrison
Clifton was one of America's great poets, whose work throughout her lifetime was committed to chronicling and celebrating black lives. The honesty, joy, wisdom, and hope she brought to this task is regenerative
Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. Poet Laureate
Clifton's earliest poems could have been written yesterday, and her later works could have been written decades ago. Each poem is always its own world. Her poems touch on the political, the personal, the spiritual
Reginald Dwayne Betts,, The New York Times
Open up to any page and Clifton delivers a word. Whether the subject is roaches, family, death, or surviving, she has a psalm for all occasions. She can create the most complicated magic out of the simplest words
Danez Smith, The Week
Clifton wrote physically small poems with enormous and profound inner worlds ... Her poems are committed to truth-telling in the face of silence. History in her work is embodied, alive, and autonomous, alert to its own contradictions
Elizabeth Alexander, New Yorker
Although her work is often spare and simple, it is always beautifully and painstakingly crafted into poems that tell the truth, poems that insist on residing within the reader, poems by a poet who seeks and achieves the ability to be a vehicle for those who may not otherwise speak
Web Del Sol Review of Books
No-one writes like Lucille Clifton ... The poems, in their specificity and dilating scale, startle readers into new sense. They discomfort as often as they bless, and they bless as often as they wonder - bearing witness to joy and to struggle
The Paris Review
Few poets have traversed such deserts, playgrounds and high castles of possibility in the briefest and seemingly effortless poetry. Her big-hearted work welcomes us and transports us with grace and mischief. It is poetry that goes down like fine wine and that sustains, in us, its good mood of inquiry ever after
Professor Daljit Nagra, Brunel University London