Recently discovered works by Maryland poet Lucille Clifton unveiled in new collection

We’ve reached the era when researchers may find more unpublished poems on a late poet’s hard drives than in her papers. American poet Lucille Clifton died in Baltimore in 2010, but scholars continue to seek out her work, discovering new poems and drafts that acted as a “rich seed-bed for multiple other poems,” says editor Kazim Ali, who has gathered both in “At the Gate: Uncollected Poems 1987-2010.”

Themes that occupied Clifton during her long career — such as motherhood, Adam and Eve, and her experience as a Black woman — reverberate in this new collection. Edgy and never sentimental, Clifton’s poetry is equally never clinical. Her eye is searching but not cold.

This is borne out by comparing versions of poems on the same topic — in one case, “children lost during Middle Passage, some cast into the seas by their own mothers as a last desperate act of maternal agency,” as Ali puts it in his end notes. Clifton published her poem “atlantic is a sea of bones” in 1987, but this posthumous collection contains the poem “la Llorona,” a lament of:

…the cursed ships that stole away

my waterlost children oh the years

on their fading faces oh the terrible sea

of their names

The suffering of children, along with the sacrifices they demand, are themes that recur throughout Clifton’s work. In books published in her lifetime, she wisely left out certain political poems tied to specific events. But some poems in “At the Gate,” including “postcards,” age disturbingly well:

our side did not see them

in the search for someone else

an enemy         we did not see the

children            nine

our national pastime

....

how we have made their people

hate us      our national pastime

Some of this book’s poems add little to what Clifton published before. Certain fragments are too slight; we can understand why she may not have wanted them made public. In this volume, a poem about a mirror has longer lines than the final version, published in 2008’s “Voices,” which has shorter ones and more white space. But, otherwise, the draft and the published poem are almost identical. In “the dead do dream,” Ali provides three additional end lines from Clifton’s drafts:

…some of them are sure

they are sleeping on ordinary pillows

they rise in their dream to haunt the lives

of their heedless kin

they are furious when they call

our names

and we pretend not to hear

In “Voices,” Clifton cut the last three lines. Ali rightly notes that these make the poem “a little snakier, a little spikier.”

“At the Gate” does contain some work that is hard to find elsewhere. Some of Clifton’s most poignant poems question her capacity for resilience:

i am learning that even

one such as i

loses hope

i am learning that i

would forget about love

if i could

i am learning

i can not

Others, like “shadow,” sketch her alter egos:

she is silent in the way

that clouds are silent,

something ominous

in her moving.

she has no children.

she cherishes only me.

there are days

when she follows me everywhere

weeping at who i am.

If the poems exploring her identity as a woman are strong, those that explore her identity as a writer are even more so. “At the Gate” includes a poem already picked up on the web, one in which the poet’s plea to “use me” is, indeed, terrifying:

poets in their bassinets

dream a splendid woman

holding over their baby eyes

a globe, shining with

possibility.       someone,

she smiles, has to see this

and report it, and they

in their innocence

believing that all will be

as beautiful as she is,

whimper          use me, use me

and oh how terrifying

that she does.

Someone does have to see this and report it. We are grateful that Clifton did.

The Banner runs book reviews in partnership with the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Laura Sheahen is a Maryland poet who spends part of her time in Tunisia.