Lucille Clifton is a poet of few words who manages to achieve with those words a layered abstractness that is staggering, but who also manages, often simultaneously, to convey a simple, raw, eye-opening, honesty that is equal parts beautiful and startling. Her eye captures the subtle shades of everyday life and her pen weaves these subtleties into works of art that cause the reader to rethink their perceptions of everything from religion, to stray animals, to stray street-walkers. She is a poet that forces the reader to ask himself, “How much do I really know about what I thought I knew.” Lucille Clifton most often creates her effects, in order of importance, through the use of extended metaphor, heavily weighted imagery, point of view, personification, and voice. Her ability to present layered abstractness is best show cased in both “Signs” and “The Death of Thelma Sayles.” Her ability to present a reflective honesty is best observed in “Wild Blessings.” I feel that her work as whole, though it is extremely diverse, is best exemplified in “How Art Thou Fallen…” A close reading of this poem will lend insight into the mechanisms that create the signature traits of her two main groupings of work, abstract and honest, and will also reveal the interaction between the groupings. What should be understood, however, is that the piece cannot present the best working of one or the other group. The selection only represents the best possible middle ground if a reader had to select a poem that could point to the honesty of Clifton’s work as well as the incredible abstract depth of her work.
“How Art Thou Fallen…” opens with language that is at once dated and elegiac that plunges the reader immediately into the poems tone of dark remorse with the presentation of the poems full title “How art thou fallen from Heaven O Lucifer, son of the morning,” the reader gains a sense that something is wrong. The son of the morning, the most beautiful creature in all the heavens has fallen. The next question in the reader’s mind is why, but the next answer in Clifton’s poem is a question. What also happens in the title is a mincing of images that a casual reader may not readily associate on a regular basis. The association of Lucifer, essentially Satan, with his former title as the son of the morning is an association that is not often cited. The association exists in the back of the minds of many people with any knowledge of biblical information, but presented with the power of the image of the son of the morning and the name Lucifer, the image strikes the reader sideways and unbalances the reading to great effect. Clifton then asks the reader in the opening lines of the poems first stanza “oh where have you fallen to” recalling in the readers mind that Lucifer did not go straight to hell, and that he made a stop along the way. The reader has an “uh oh” moment in which they remember with alarm that the fall of man is on the way. This true and honest sense of alarm would not be possible without Clifton’s choice of voice and point of view, which happens to be that of one who is in heaven looking out on all that is happening. Clifton’s work goes on, observing, “it is all shadow” in heaven without Lucifer, which could be read as a metaphor for sin; meaning that the sin was in letting Lucifer go, casting him out, which brings wonderment to the reader’s mind as he rethinks right and wrong and what is and is not sin. Lucille does not give the reader much time to mull over this before reeling on to reveal that Jesus is pointing to the garden and then whisking us around to see what it is he is seeing just too fast to process everything we have just taken in, but not too fast to feel the rising strain of things flying awry and the helplessness of the point of view. Then “light breaks… where no eye is prepared to see.” The fear that was quickly spun by Clifton in the early lines suddenly materializes like a net pulling tight around the reader as all of the little abstract hints and clues become the fall of man in a beautiful point of light, asking the reader to again reconsider what is darkness and sin and what is a gift, a present, when the choice to receive or reject is not wholly one’s own. And finally “the animals rise up to walk.” This line alone asks the reader to consider whether man was truly man before Lucifer gave him the apple from the tree of knowledge. Was he man or was he just another animal roaming the garden with privileges above other animals? Lucille Clifton writes this poem with few words, but by poems end has managed to convey a multi layered abstraction of the Garden of Eden’s corruption and has also managed to present an honest look at what Lucifer did from a perspective that forces us to question true motives and true understanding of right and wrong.
That being said, it is certainly worthwhile to discuss the weaknesses in her writing before going any further. Lucille Clifton is a poet of few words and her tendency to write in shorter forms sometimes leaves the wonderful sense of mystery and wonder in the frustrating domain of bland of vagueness. A few of her poems are cheapened by the sense of unearned mystification, as though instead of conveying a truly interesting concept she merely resorted to smoke and mirrors and misdirection to get the reader to wow at something that did not at all merit wonderment. A long-winded example of this is “The Garden of Delight.” The poem is one of her longer pieces, which allows her to play more intensely with language, but she still manages to lose the reader in what can be best described as imagistic noise. Instead of presenting the reader with a noun or a pronoun she only offers that the poem is direct to “some,” a term that is far to broad to point the reader in any direction that would lead to greater understanding. After letting the reader know it is directed to “some” she then rains heavily weighted images throughout, which has the effect of asking the readers to run uphill to nowhere in particular with a wet carpet draped across their backs. She also has a habit of doing something similar in some of her series poems, like the Fox series, and the notes to Clark Kent. At a handful of points the poems seem to possess no purpose beyond giving the reader something interesting to read, like cheap filling that moonlights as something meant to have substance. Lucille also slips into what can be termed introspective feministic rants from time to time, most evident in Quilting (1991), but the books seems to have been written hand in hand with several personal struggles so it is understandable that as a writer she sought and likely found strength in her writing. Although the poems that can be lumped into the former category were monotonous, uninteresting, and preachy at their finest, they should be considered exceptional for the contexts in which they were written.
Although the feminist bent is most evident in the poems of her personal struggles, there are other recurring images throughout her works. The one image that seems to transcend each collection of poems is the image of the moon. For example, there is the moon as an evil eye that sees all and does nothing in the “Shape Shifter Poems”, and there is the moon as a metaphor for the beauty of the child, and queen over nature in “Moonchild,” and there is moon as metaphor for the beauty of a full bodied woman in “Song at Midnight.” The moon is used and reused with similar effect through out her books, be it a quick aside about the moon or the moon as the subject of the entire poem. Another recurring image is that of the fox. The fox is presented as an enigmatic object that drops onto the feet of the woman who birthed Christ and can be read in more than one way in “My Dream About the Second Coming.” The image reappears again in the fox series in The Terrible Stories and can be read as an animal at first, but then shifts to what could be interpreted as a person by series end. Also recurring is the image of the Amazon and the characters associated with the Garden of Eden, Adam, Eve, and Lucifer, but not God. One explanation for these images recurring is that they all tie into the picture Lucille Clifton paints of a strong, sensual, faulted, honest woman. Lucifer is not the only radiant being capable of seduction. Adam is not the name giver to all creatures and master of all. The Fox is cunning and sleek and so is woman. Women are Amazon warriors. The Garden of Eden was a decadent, beautiful, sexually charged, brilliant place attributable mainly to the presence of woman. These themes appear and reappear across the gamut of Clifton’s work and when they do show up they are very likely to be hand in hand with Foxes, Amazons, Gardens, Lucifers, Eves, Adams, and Moons.
