The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010

Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years.–Publishers Weekly

All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it.–Publishers Weekly

If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it.–NPR

The ‘Collected Clifton’ is a gift, not just for her fans…but for all of us.–The Washington Post

The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton–both the woman and her poetry–is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness.–Toni Morrison, from the Foreword

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton’s published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton’s lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet’s career.

On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America.

mother-tongue: to man-kind (from the unpublished the book of days):

all that I am asking is
that you see me as something
more than a common occurrence,
more than a woman in her ordinary skin.