Blessing The Boats

by Lucille Clifton

This career-spanning selection - which won the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry - is the perfect introduction to Clifton's poetry (which has yet to be published by a UK publisher)

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

Published March 2, 2023

About the author

Lucille Clifton was an American poet, writer, and educator from New York. Common topics in her poetry include the celebration of her African American heritage, and feminist themes, with particular emphasis on the female body.

She was the first person in her family to finish high school and attend college. She started Howard University on scholarship as a drama major but lost the scholarship two years later.

Thus began her writing career.

Good Times, her first book of poems, was published in 1969. She has since been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and has been honored as Maryland's Poet Laureate.

Ms. Clifton's foray into writing for children began with Some of the Days of Everett Anderson, published in 1970.

In 1976, Generations: A Memoir was published. In 2000, she won the National Book Award for Poetry, for her work "Poems Seven".

From 1985 to 1989, Clifton was a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland. From 1995 to 1999, she was a visiting professor at Columbia University. In 2006, she was a fellow at Dartmouth College.

Clifton received the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement posthumously, from the Poetry Society of America.

Reviews

[Elina · Rating 5 out of 5]

“not the moon that awful eye”
Lucille, your words, your words!!

[Libby Fallance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Woah

[Stephen Dilley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comprising selections from different collections between 1988 and 2000, Lucille Clifton's 'Blessing the Boats' won a National Book Award for Poetry when it was first published in the US, so its publication by Penguin is a welcome addition to their Modern Classics series. I already knew and liked a few of Clifton's poems (including the title poem) but this book offered the chance to explore her work more fully.

Clifton is a poet of tremendous range; many of her poems are intensely personal and often explore the female body, whether drawing on her experiences of cancer, menstruation or pregnancy. She is also deeply concerned with the oppression of African-American people, from slavery to lynching. Other poems take on a more mythic feel, for instance extended sequences of poems about Lucifer, Adam, Eve and the Garden of Eden. Her free verse, lower-case poems are deceptively simple, and often her complex arrangement of images reward careful re-readings. Others are devastatingly clear, such as the brilliant "why some people be mad at me sometimes":

“they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.”

There are tremendous riches to be found in this collection and I hope its release by Penguin will encourage more British readers to explore Clifton's work. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

[Siobhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blessing The Boats is a book of Lucille Clifton's collected poetry spanning 1988-2000, now published under Penguin Modern Classics in the UK. The poetry within spans a huge range of subjects from injustice and race to motherhood and health, the Garden of Eden to Superman. Clifton's style is deeply engaging, with a lot of precise and concise lines and imagery and short poems, sometimes in a sequence talking to each other.

Some of my favourite poems in the collection were the ones about Lucifer and Adam and Eve (strangely the collection had already got me thinking about writing poems about Lucifer before I reached multiple of them to read) and the poems to Clark Kent. I also really like the 'shapeshifter poems' which I think would sit very nicely alongside a lot of modern poetry. In general, the poems felt really timeless to me, and it is the sort of collected poems that makes you want to return to it, and also read more of Clifton's individual collections.

[Ben Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucille Clifton, who passed away in 2010, is celebrated here with a collection of her best works from a number of books. It is a very fine introduction to a writer whose work is both deeply humane and deeply imbued with faith.

Clifton was a self-proclaimed "two-headed woman" (which was also the title of her first major collection, though no poems from that work appear here). Two-headed woman is an African-American term used to describe someone who lives in both the material world and the spirit world. Through her short, space poems, Clifton is able to conjure up multitudes. Each of her poems contain a line, an image or a feeling so expertly drawn it causes the reader to draw breath. I was in awe.

Of course not every poem works as well as the others, and I found the later poems much more arresting than the earlier works, but these are just personal feelings and not a criticism of the work as a whole. Read as a whole, this is a superb collection and one that has made me seek out more from this two-headed woman.

Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for the ARC.

[Iulia · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘the photograph: a lynching’
‘grief’
‘my dream about the second coming’
‘blessing the boats’

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“they ask me to remember / but they want me to remember / their memories / and i keep on remembering / mine”. Lucille Clifton’s poetry is not super familiar to me, though I’m pretty sure I recognised this short piece, ‘why some people be mad at me sometimes’; this selection of her work Blessing The Boats, spanning a long career, newly (re?)published in the UK, so clearly proves her high place in the pantheon of the greatest late twentieth- / early twenty-first-century American poets. Her writing on womanhood, the body, Blackness and poetry itself is as visionary as it is lyrical, and somehow sparse, un-ornate. I was stunned by poems like ‘dialysis’ (“after the cancer i was so grateful to be alive. i am alive and furious. Blessed be even this?”), ‘study the masters’, ‘shapeshifter poems’, ‘the yeti poet returns to his village to tell his story’, ‘alabama 9/15/63’, ‘far memory’, the exceptional ‘1994’, and ‘donor’ (“suppose my body does say no to yours. again, again i feel you buckled in despite me, lex, fastened to life like the frown on an angel's brow.”). Then there’s the title poem, in which Clifton is at her most hopeful: “may you kiss / the wind then turn from it certain that it will / love your back may you open your eyes to water / water waving forever / and may you in your innocence sail through this to that”. I also loved the gorgeous series of poems addressed to Clark Kent and Superman, as well as the more stark poems, informed by the coldness of the world, as in ‘the times’: “another child has killed a child / and i catch myself relieved that they are / white and i might understand except / that i am tired of understanding.”

[Conor]

There's that quote—I wanna say by Billy Collins—about how if we're honest with ourselves, even the best poets will likely only write a handful of truly great poems in their lifetimes. I think there's some truth to this, and it makes reviewing poetry collections funny. Especially this one, where it's a sort of selected poems, but the selections aren't in chronological order. The first forty pages of this book blew my head off. Clear, dark, propulsive, diamantine: the type of poems I'd give to someone who doesn't like poetry to convert them. The presentation of love, breast cancer, racialised violence, all done lightly but completely vividly, so you don't feel these very real, awful things are being lost in prettified language. And the voice! Then the middle forty, which go back some years chronologically, are like heavily focused on the Bible and are...not anything to write home about. They're not bad, they're just okay. And then the collection concludes with some strong poems again about similar themes to before (though, granted, with a few excellent religious ones too, such as the closer 'Heaven'). While those middle poems diluted the splendour of the ones either side, it feels unfair to demerit the entire collection as a consequence. A really great poem is a rare thing, but it's also a protean, multitudinous thing, something remade every time it's reread. So there's no point making it a numbers game. In her best work, Clifton shows a shred of everyday life and packs infinity into it.

[Hollis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just read the new poems included in this volume. I believe “moonchild” was one of the first Clifton poems I was introduced to, where she writes, for one stanza:

the moon understands dark places.
the moon has secrets of her own.
she holds what light she can.

The full poem exemplifies Clifton’s ability to bring a sort of ‘fragile girlhood curiosity about the world’ into chillingly vulnerable poetry. “dialysis” & “the photograph: a lynching” are other standouts. I will say, the “Lazarus sequence” was such a strong retread that I briefly confused myself into thinking I had accidentally grabbed one of her previous volumes.

These poems arrived a couple years after Clifton had been established as one of the contemporary greats. So I suppose I can forgive retreads at this poet. Though, it does bring me back to earlier chances of thought where I wondered if—regardless of how much I love Clifton (at this point I’ve probably read more poems by her than anyone else)—she had a bit of a tendency towards stagnation…. anyways, just a brief thought, and certainly not one to argue strongly based on later material.

[Shari · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fine collection of some of the late poet Lucille Clifton's work. It won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2000 and I can see why. Her poems are direct and hard-hitting. They unflinchingly explore her experiences as a Black woman, the mother of Black children, racism, misogyny, war, family relationships, and more. I read many of them more than once and stopped to think about her words. This collection would be an excellent introduction to her work, but also poetry in general. I have had people tell me that they find poetry to be inaccessible or off-putting. This is neither of those things--it's a collection well worth reading.

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of short poems from this American author I didn’t know. They swirl around themes of God and Lucifer, Adam and Eve, race and women, wombs, periods, breast cancer and other diseases, and… Superman. The poems seem very personal, close to her life and beliefs. Few words, but beautifully put together to convey profound messages. A discovery.

https://redheadwithabrain.ch/index.ph...

[Miselonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This books feels like the sun on my skin, warm and rich and delicate. It is a good read if you're looking for something to place your thoughts on.

Thank you to Netgalley and BOA Editions Ltd. for approving my request of the eARC!!

[Cooch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly good poems

The poetry gets better through the years. There are some memorable poems, but, in my opinion, few very good, or great, ones. Well worth a read.

[Lisa Houston · Rating 1 out of 5]

Weird, weirder, and weirdest.

[Bert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Year of Reading by Shakespeare and Company #6

[erin donohue · Rating 5 out of 5]

So so good. Lucille Clifton is so economical with her words. Her writing is so pared back that every single word is like a punch to the face. A true master. I read this book twice in like four days.

[Beth Younge · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this collection of poetry. The writing was done beautifully and there were so many beautifully written passages in this that will stay with me. I would read more by this author as i loved what i read so far.

I received this book in exchange for a honest review.

[Andy Hickman · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘Blessing the Boats’ – Lucille Clifton
In a Celtic tradition of symbolism of the elements. ***

[Ani · Rating 4 out of 5]

*a screaming cat gif*