It could be the horror of world events or the intensity of a particularly brutal election decade, but I’ve found myself pulled back to an emotionally groundbreaking book of poetry, The Book of Light, first published back in 1992 and written by Lucille Clifton, one of our greatest poets.
This collection seems to mirror the terrors of our times in such unexpected (and expected) ways; Clifton writes with a kind of commanding vulnerability that chars the flameless heart, reawakening us to topics of identity, apathy, getting older as a woman, the endurance of generational racism, and so much more.
In these emotionally evergreen poems, Clifton both condemns and celebrates the imperfections and expectations of womanhood while speaking to the social mores of women’s ambition, failure, and loneliness writ large. In the poem “it was a dream,” Clifton conjures the holiest ghost of herself; the one who was supposed to do and say and be everything right: “In which my greater self/rose up before me/accusing me of my life/with her extra finger/whirling in a gyre of rage,” begin the familiar, potent opening lines of this powerful poem. Clifton pleads with this apparition, asking what she could have done–perhaps differently or better.
Clifton holds herself fully accountable with the eerie and eternal reminder that if we don’t fight for our higher selves, our bodies, and our futures, someone else will do it for us. Before we all find ourselves asking what could have been done on the other side of what will be done, Clifton speaks: “And she twisted her wild hair/and sparked her wild eyes/and screamed as long as/I could hear her/This. This. This.”
