Mercy
Lucille Clifton
BOA Editions, 2004
Reviewed by Jane Hoogestraat
Professor of English
Recently, a former student referred me back to Lucille Clifton. We talked about how her aesthetic is accessible, although not simple, and how because of the former, her work may be underrated. In Mercy, Clifton articulates a social consciousness with a clearly spiritual underpinning—her work is not about easy forgiveness (or forgetfulness), but there is a certain gentleness to poems such as “the river between us,” which reads (in part):
in the river that your father fished
my father was baptized. it was
their hunger that defined them,
one, a man who knew he could
feed himself if it all came down,
the other a man who knew he needed help.
this is about more than color. it is
about how we learn to see ourselves.
it is about geography and memory.
American poetry has not developed a sufficient vocabulary (yet) for talking about the forms that underlie free verse (poetry not written in traditional meter or rhyme.) I do not have a theory to account for Clifton’s use of the lower case or her experiments with syntax and punctuation, except to say that things are more complicated than they seem.
Notably, Mercy contains the fine sequence “september song a poem in 7 days.” In a poem dated the third day, Clifton writes:
the firemen
ascend
like Jacobs ladder
into the mouth of
history
There are more references in Clifton to the various names of God than I had remembered, more surprising turns on the spiritual than I had seen before. My former student referred me even more specifically to Clifton’s long poem “the message from The Ones,” which includes the haunting lines:
the angels have no wings
they come to you wearing
their own clothes
they have learned to love you
and will keep coming
unless you insist on wings