One of my favorite poems ever is Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats.” I love everything about this poem—its simplicity, its wishfulness, and its ability to dive below the depths of its frank, sparse phrasing—but my favorite thing about it is the between-worlds feeling I get at the end of the poem, when I sense that there is something beyond the horizon that I can’t see yet. It makes the world feel bigger, more expansive, and when I read this poem, I feel like Clifton knows something important about the wideness of the world. So, I was thrilled to read At the Gate: Uncollected Poems 1987-2010, and to discover that same in-between feeling in the title poem, as though Clifton had an ability to reach beyond her lifetime, into this current moment, and show me something incredible.
This collection, edited by Kazim Ali, includes newly-discovered works from Clifton’s archives, and although some poems were written as far back as 1987, their wisdom endures. In his foreword to the collection, Ali writes that Clifton is “edgier here” than in other published works, and speculates “that she herself felt freer to experiment and play” in these pieces. We see this experimentation in poems that appear in multiple drafts, such as “too easy (first draft)” and “too easy (second draft),” in which Clifton pares down the language by the second draft and dials up the urgency of the poem as she plays with repetition and form. Her edginess is present throughout, apparent when Clifton shocks readers with an unexpected phrase or strikingly powerful feeling. In “my grandfather’s good lullaby,” for instance, we might recoil from the end of the first stanza:
they's a world outside
the window
and somebody in it
hates you
Readers may balk at this lullaby, stunned by the sting of “hates you,” even as they are impressed with the force of Clifton’s language. So many lines and phrases stand out from this collection as new favorites—among them, “as if paint could stop peeling/from our houses every year.” It’s difficult, though, to extract quotations from the complete poems, knowing that the weight of Clifton’s words often comes from the way she deliberately positions phrases within each poem to startle, delight, or warn. The peeling paint in Clifton’s poem, “pine river, r.i.p.,” takes on a more dismal quality in context:
as if the past were innocent
as if paint could stop peeling
from our houses every year
In “shadow,” Clifton speaks of “something ominous” in the speaker’s own shadow, and that vaguely unsettled feeling reverberates in lines throughout the collection, appearing again in “garden,” where “every eden feels like home/in the beginning,” but “we” fail to notice “the fingers of Creation/slowly lifting away.” Here, we might heed an important lesson: pay attention, not only to brilliant images like “the glowing soil/the spinning water,” which could appear only to an eye that is, like Clifton’s, keenly attuned to the artistry of the natural world, but also to the many injustices that haunt Clifton’s work. In “black mother,” a poem that, as explained in Ali’s notes, references an act of police brutality against a teenage boy, Clifton writes, “i look away/i sit and stare into history,” which is, as she reminds us in many of her poems, often brutal.
There is so much to learn from Clifton’s work: about history, hope, and the radiance of language that is artfully distilled into clear, resonant, urgently necessary poems that will linger with readers for years to come. What could be better than a collection of poems from a remarkable poet we thought we had heard everything from? It’s like finding a new photograph of someone you have lost—that blurring of recognition and surprise. What a gift, this collection of poems that we never knew we’d have; what a relief, to know that life doesn’t really end, not when poems pour out from the past to say just the right thing, at just the right time.
Sarah Peace is an intern at Boa Editions and a student success coach for TRiO at Monroe Community College. She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Irvine. She has taught writing courses at John Carroll University, Cleveland State University, and elsewhere.
