Lost Names: Lucille Clifton
Andrea Brady, 22 April 2021
Lucille Clifton developed an intensely economical style: short lines, sparse punctuation, ordinary language whose modesty is stressed by its lack of capitals. Her poems seem simple, but build unpredictably towards flashpoints of revelation. She twists the material of daily life into what Toni Morrison called ‘re-memory’, the clamour of history in the present.