This Sunday, as part of our Bookshelf series on notable women writers, we step into the taut, unflinching world of Lucille Clifton, the Black American poet who carved a space for quiet resistance in contemporary literature.
In a literary world that often seeks to frame Black identity through trauma or spectacle, Clifton wrote from the inside, with the simple, devastating authority of someone who had lived it.
Clifton was born Thelma Lucille Sayles in Depew, New York 1936, the daughter of a steelworker and laundress. She grew up in Buffalo, where the harsh winters and industrial landscape shaped her imagination.
Her mother, Thelma Moore Sayles, wrote poetry in secret, scribbling verses on scraps of paper until her father, a man who believed that Black girls had no business writing, burned them. The image never left Clifton. If she wrote, she decided, she would write as if fire were always near.
She was educated at Fosdick-Masten Park High School, excelling despite an environment that made no room for girls like her. At Howard University, where she studied for two years, she sat in classrooms alongside Toni Morrison and Sterling Brown, absorbing the intellectual radicalism of Black literature and thought.
But academia did not hold her. She transferred to the State University of New York at Fredonia, where she finished her studies before marrying Fred Clifton, a professor of philosophy and sculptor, in 1958. They raised six children together, and their home was a place of poetry and survival.
Clifton did not come to poetry through literary salons or creative writing workshops. She wrote because she had to.
Her first book, Good Times (1969), was a revelation. Its compact and searing poems spoke of Blackness, poverty, and womanhood—without excess, without adornment. The New York Times named it one of the year’s best books.
Her second collection, Good News About the Earth (1972), was sharper, more urgent, and written after the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. She dedicated it to the political prisoners of the era. She did not call herself an activist, but her work never looked away.
She was a poet of history, of reckoning, but also of the body. In An Ordinary Woman (1974), she celebrated Black female power with a defiant joy that stunned critics who expected despair. “Homage to my hips,” perhaps her most quoted poem, reads like a battle cry:
these hips are big hips
they don’t fit into little petty places
these hips are free hips
Clifton’s work was personal, but never just personal. Her March poems were not about spring in bloom but about survival. In “The Lesson of the falling leaves,” she wrote:
the leaves believe
such letting go is love
She understood that spring is not just renewal but release. That it is a season of transition, of uncertainty. Her poetry, like spring itself, was never soft or easy. It was a reckoning.
Spring returned again and again in her work, not as a time of pure beauty but of contradiction. It was the promise of new life and the reminder of what had died.
In “Cutting Greens,” she describes preparing food, the knife slicing through the thick flesh of vegetables, and suddenly, she is not just making a meal—she is witnessing the cycle of life, the inevitable transformation of one thing into another.
I am cutting greens
and the greens roll black under the knife
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
Her body, too, became a landscape of change, and Clifton never flinched from its betrayals. In The Book of Light (1993), she wrote about breast cancer, about losing loved ones, and about the slow fading of flesh. Clifton knew that the body, like the seasons, would turn. And yet, even in pain, she found something holy in the simple act of being alive.
“the green of Jesus”
“is breaking the ground”
“and the sweet smell.”
“of delicious Lenten lilies”
“born of the spring”
“is darting around the house”
For Clifton, spring was not sentimental. It was urgent. It was proof that life insists on itself, that the earth does not ask permission to begin again. Even as she wrote about her mortality, she did so with the same measured, unwavering grace that defined all her work.
She was diagnosed with cancer in 1990. She survived. It returned. She survived again. She did not write about it as tragedy but as fact, part of the pattern of things. In Blessing the Boats (2000), she wrote what could be read as her farewell:
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
She was not afraid.
Despite writing against the grain of what publishers expected from Black women poets, Clifton’s work resonated. She became Maryland’s poet laureate from 1979 to 1985, the first Black woman to hold the title. She taught at Coppin State, Columbia University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, shaping a generation of poets who learned from her restraint.
She received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and the Coretta Scott King Award for her children’s books. She became the first poet to have two books nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. When she won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2000, she accepted it with the quiet, knowing smile of someone who had long been writing in the face of erasure.
Yet Clifton’s greatest subject was not politics, race, or gender—it was mortality. She did not dwell on it with despair but with acceptance. She saw death as part of life, just as winter folds into spring.
She died on February 13, 2010, but her poetry is still here—spare, luminous, unbreakable.
Asked once what she wanted to leave behind, she said, simply: “My poems. And some peace.”
Lucille Clifton did not write about spring as a season of mere prettiness. She wrote about its restlessness, its refusal to stay in one place. Much like her poetry, it was a force that could not be tamed.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media journalist and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir, Love The Dark Days.
Author inquiries: iras[email protected]