Somehow Blessing the Boats was the first Lucille Clifton collection I have read, which is EMBARRASSING, as I have been intending to read her for ages (and have certainly read isolated poems of hers here and there.)

Her writing is spare and accessible and razor sharp, exemplified by a poem like "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

I didn't quite fall all the way in love with these, which is I think largely because this is a collection from collections (which I somehow didn't realize when I picked this up). These cherry-picked "best of" collections many have isolated favorites, but I almost always prefer encountering the poems in their home collections, like listening to songs in their original albums rather than a "Best Of" CD. The context is missing.

I will have to pick up one of those soon. ( )

I thought I'd like this book at first glance. I saw it had been written by an African American woman, and it was the winner of the National Book Award.

I was wrong. I read the poems aloud, but I got very little out of most of them. They sounded fine, but seemed to be way over my head. I simply did not understand what they were trying to say. There were very few that appealed to me. Those were Sorrow Song (the eyes of children), Photograph (black boys twirling), and (the best one) Wishes for Sons (a hex on men).

This is not the kind of poetry I like. I am curious, though, as to what is so appealling about most of these poems to others? ( )

I read quite a bit of poetry, though I rarely end up sitting down and reading a collection by a single author at once without jumping between collections, journals, etc. This was an exception. I had read Clifton before, but only poems that were dropped into larger anthologies, and while I'd enjoyed them, I was never blown away. This collection, though, is one I'll keep and return to, and there are quite a few poems I'll be copying down into a journal I keep of favorite poems. There are some authors you go to for their language, and some for their ideas. Those who really capture you with both--particularly on a regular basis within their works, I find rarely. Here though, there's little left to be desired. The poems are beautiful, unique, thoughtful, and what's more, they're accessable. If you enjoy poetry, I strongly recommend this collection. I will say that I found the ending section to be the weakest--it was enjoyable, but didn't live up to the earlier work in the collection. If you're not deadset on reading the whole thing straight through, I'd recommend reading the last section, the poems from The Terrible Stories, first, and then beginning at the beginning to read the rest and the best of the work. That last section, by the way is about 18 pages out of 128, and it's still worthwhile, just not as memorable as the earlier portions of the book. Enjoy. ( )

This was a present to me from Lucille Clifton and my undergraduate college, St. Mary's College of Maryland, upon my graduation in 2000. The namesake of the book comes from a practice at St. Mary's City where the boats are blessed.