There were some pieces in this collection that I really loved, and others that I couldn't connect with. Maybe this is due to the many collections the pieces are drawn from which were written over the span of more than a decade.

This books feels like the sun on my skin, warm and rich and delicate. It is a good read if you're looking for something to place your thoughts on.

Thank you to Netgalley and BOA Editions Ltd. for approving my request of the eARC!!

I loved this collection of poetry. The writing was done beautifully and there were so many beautifully written passages in this that will stay with me. I would read more by this author as i loved what i read so far.

“they ask me to remember / but they want me to remember / their memories / and i keep on remembering / mine”. Lucille Clifton’s poetry is not super familiar to me, though I’m pretty sure I recognised this short piece, ‘why some people be mad at me sometimes’; this selection of her work Blessing The Boats, spanning a long career, newly (re?)published in the UK, so clearly proves her high place in the pantheon of the greatest late twentieth- / early twenty-first-century American poets. Her writing on womanhood, the body, Blackness and poetry itself is as visionary as it is lyrical, and somehow sparse, un-ornate. I was stunned by poems like ‘dialysis’ (“after the cancer i was so grateful to be alive. i am alive and furious. Blessed be even this?”), ‘study the masters’, ‘shapeshifter poems’, ‘the yeti poet returns to his village to tell his story’, ‘alabama 9/15/63’, ‘far memory’, the exceptional ‘1994’, and ‘donor’ (“suppose my body does say no to yours. again, again i feel you buckled in despite me, lex, fastened to life like the frown on an angel's brow.”). Then there’s the title poem, in which Clifton is at her most hopeful: “may you kiss / the wind then turn from it certain that it will / love your back may you open your eyes to water / water waving forever / and may you in your innocence sail through this to that”. I also loved the gorgeous series of poems addressed to Clark Kent and Superman, as well as the more stark poems, informed by the coldness of the world, as in ‘the times’: “another child has killed a child / and i catch myself relieved that they are / white and i might understand except / that i am tired of understanding.”

This is a fine collection of some of the late poet Lucille Clifton's work. It won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2000 and I can see why. Her poems are direct and hard-hitting. They unflinchingly explore her experiences as a Black woman, the mother of Black children, racism, misogyny, war, family relationships, and more. I read many of them more than once and stopped to think about her words. This collection would be an excellent introduction to her work, but also poetry in general. I have had people tell me that they find poetry to be inaccessible or off-putting. This is neither of those things--it's a collection well worth reading.

A stunning collection of poems by Lucille Clifton, one of the most celebrated of America's poets, who I, shamefully had never read until now. These are tiny, sharp fragments of a life, hammered into the page with words that never shy away from violence or brutality or loss, but which nevertheless manage to celebrate life. Elements in these poems reminded me very much of the late poetry of Thom Gunn, they have a similar sense of place and often, an aching loss.

An interesting read for me some poems worked better than others. I guess I am not the target demographic so for me not the greatest poetry collection I have read.

Lucille Clifton has been an inspiration to African American poets for decades. She has not only transcended the influence of the past on the future and portrayed her interest in spirituality in her poetry since she first used an Ouija board, but also depicted her experiences with African American family life.

Something that is prevalent in Clifton's poems is their intimacy. She is not writing for an audience; she is writing for herself. Her poignantly worded sentences and detailed word choices are beautiful and easily evoke emotional responses from the reader.

However, some of these poems left me underwhelmed, left me viewing these poems as an incomprehensible enigma, them lacking the confidentiality and the personal elements to them and being quite unmemorable.

An overall nice collection of poems that I would recommend if you are starting out with Clifton's work, but definitely not my favorite of all poems.

Between this and the new anthology of overlooked Black voices in poetry, this year has been very good for readers interested in reclaiming Black poetry from the forgotten corners of the bookshelves.

Comprising selections from different collections between 1988 and 2000, Lucille Clifton's 'Blessing the Boats' won a National Book Award for Poetry when it was first published in the US, so its publication by Penguin is a welcome addition to their Modern Classics series. I already knew and liked a few of Clifton's poems (including the title poem) but this book offered the chance to explore her work more fully.

Clifton is a poet of tremendous range; many of her poems are intensely personal and often explore the female body, whether drawing on her experiences of cancer, menstruation or pregnancy. She is also deeply concerned with the oppression of African-American people, from slavery to lynching. Other poems take on a more mythic feel, for instance extended sequences of poems about Lucifer, Adam, Eve and the Garden of Eden. Her free verse, lower-case poems are deceptively simple, and often her complex arrangement of images reward careful re-readings. Others are devastatingly clear, such as the brilliant "why some people be mad at me sometimes":

“they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.”

There are tremendous riches to be found in this collection and I hope its release by Penguin will encourage more British readers to explore Clifton's work. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

Marvelous book of poetry, this is a book on a different level, it is a masterpiece, beautiful, meaningful and thought provoking and sometimes devastating.

Blessing The Boats is a book of Lucille Clifton's collected poetry spanning 1988-2000, now published under Penguin Modern Classics in the UK. The poetry within spans a huge range of subjects from injustice and race to motherhood and health, the Garden of Eden to Superman. Clifton's style is deeply engaging, with a lot of precise and concise lines and imagery and short poems, sometimes in a sequence talking to each other.

Some of my favourite poems in the collection were the ones about Lucifer and Adam and Eve (strangely the collection had already got me thinking about writing poems about Lucifer before I reached multiple of them to read) and the poems to Clark Kent. I also really like the 'shapeshifter poems' which I think would sit very nicely alongside a lot of modern poetry. In general, the poems felt really timeless to me, and it is the sort of collected poems that makes you want to return to it, and also read more of Clifton's individual collections.

Lucille Clifton, who passed away in 2010, is celebrated here with a collection of her best works from a number of books. It is a very fine introduction to a writer whose work is both deeply humane and deeply imbued with faith.

Clifton was a self-proclaimed "two-headed woman" (which was also the title of her first major collection, though no poems from that work appear here). Two-headed woman is an African-American term used to describe someone who lives in both the material world and the spirit world. Through her short, space poems, Clifton is able to conjure up multitudes. Each of her poems contain a line, an image or a feeling so expertly drawn it causes the reader to draw breath. I was in awe.

Of course not every poem works as well as the others, and I found the later poems much more arresting than the earlier works, but these are just personal feelings and not a criticism of the work as a whole. Read as a whole, this is a superb collection and one that has made me seek out more from this two-headed woman.

Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for the ARC.