Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1998-2000, Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions, 2000)

Poetry can be a direct route to the heart of things. Many of the best poets distill experience by clearing away the detritus of unnecessary detail that obscures our understanding of them. Lucille Clifton is such a master of distillation. She pares away the clutter and offers her readers poems that are both accessible and wise. Because of its simple language and stirring themes, Clifton's work is affirming and inspiring for adult literacy and language learners.

For many years, through numerous books, Clifton has explored what it is to be a woman, an African-American, a mother, a daughter, a victim, a survivor. Her most recent volume, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems: 1988-2000, which won the National Book Award last year, in large part confronts loss. The poems examine the pain and the transformation of life's "boats," or experiences, carrying us "out/beyond the face of fear." Some of the pain she evokes is personal: the death of loved ones and her own struggle with breast cancer. Other poems, however, speak to the pain within our society. For example, in "jasper texas 1998," she responds to the slaying of James Byrd, the black man dragged to his death from a truck driven by a group of white men. The haunting last stanza reads:

The townsfolk sing we shall overcome
while hope bleeds slowly away from
    my mouth
into the dirt that covers us all.
i am done with this dust, i am done.

While the tone of many of the poems in Blessing the Boats is grim, the overall impact of the books is not. Ultimately what Clifton leaves us with -- through her signature style and free-verse lines, extensive use of dramatic monologue and autobiographical anecdote, and preference for lower-case letters -- is an uplifting sense that grief and evil can be transcended and that a source of rejuvenation is the essence of experience, distilled.

Jeri Bayer is the Curriculum Frameworks Coordinator at SABES Northeast. She can be reached at jeribayer@aol.com