Blessing The Boats (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Clifton, Lucille

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241609011 ISBN 13: 9780241609019

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2023

Synopsis

An award-winning collection from one of America's most beloved twentieth-century poets

'The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton - both the woman and her poetry - is constant and deeply felt' Toni Morrison

Lucille Clifton was one of the most distinguished American poets of the twentieth century. This award-winning collection of her poems showcases the simplicity and song-like grace with which she addressed the whole of human experience: birth, death, children, dreams, spirituality, womanhood, illness, sexuality and racial injustice.

'Physically small poems with enormous and profound inner worlds' Elizabeth Alexander, New Yorker

'Clifton's earliest poems could have been written yesterday, and her later works could have been written decades ago' Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Times

'A poetry so pared down that its spaces take on substance, become a shaping presence as much as the words themselves' Peggy Rosenthal

About this title

About the Author

Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) was one of the most distinguished, decorated and beloved poets of her time. She won the National Book Award for Poetry for Blessing the Boats and was the first African American female recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Foundation. Clifton received many additional honors throughout her career, including the Discovery Award in 1969 for her first collection Good Times, a 1976 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for the television special Free to Be You and Me, a Lannan Literary Award in 1994, and the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America in 2010. Her honours and awards give testa­ment to the universality of her unique and resonant voice. She was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library in 1996, served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and was elected a Fellow in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1987, she became the first author to have two books of poetry - Good Woman and Next - chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. She was also the author of eighteen children's books, and in 1984 received the Coretta Scott King Award from the American Library Association for her book Everett Anderson's Good-bye.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241609011
• ISBN 13: 9780241609019
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128