BookWoman

"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." --Publisher's Weekly