Synopses & Reviews
LAST COPIES. Poetry. Memoir. African American Studies. A landmark collection by one of America's major black poets, GOOD WOMAN includes all of Lucille Clifton's previously published books of extraordinarily vibrant poetry, as well as her haunting prose memoir GENERATIONS.
Synopsis
Finalist for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry A landmark collection by one of America's major black poets, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 includes all of Lucille Clifton's first four published collections of extraordinary vibrant poetry--Good Times, Good News About the Earth, An Ordinary Woman, and Two-Headed Woman--as well as her haunting prose memoir, Generations.
Synopsis
"Lucille Clifton is one of the four or five most authentic and profound living American poets. Her ear is fine-tuned to the subtle relationship of verbal music to image and metaphor; and her imagination avails itself of that osmosis by which the mythic is realized in the quotidian, the humble and everyday is illuminated by the spiritual."
-Denise Levertov
february 13, 1980
twenty-one years of my life you have been
the lost color in my eye. my secret blindness,
all my seeings turned grey with your going.
mother, i have worn your name like a shield.
it has torn but protected me all these years,
now even your absence comes of age.
i put on a dress called woman for this day
but i am not grown away from you
whatever i say.
Synopsis
Finalist, 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. "Lucille Clifton is one of the four or five most authentic and profound living American poets."--Denise Levertov
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.