Poetry

Mercy

Winner of the National Book Award

Lucille Clifton understands that other people's joy, grief, and loss stand in direct relationship with her own. Amid turns sad, exuberant and angry, her voice has always been one of great empathy and wisdom -- as she says, "the only mercy is memory." In Mercy, her eleventh book of poetry, the National Book Award-winner speaks to the tenuous relationship between mothers and daughters, the open wounds of terrorism and racial prejudice, and the redemptive gifts of faith and art.

An Excerpt from "surely i am able to write poems"

surely i am able to write poems
celebrating grass and how the blue
in the sky can flow green or red
and the waters lean against the
chesapeake shore like a familiar,
poems about nature and landscape
surely but whenever i begin
"the trees wave their knotted branches
and..." why is there under that poem always
an other poem?

©BOA Editions, Ltd 2004

Available editions:
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Cloth ISBN: 1-929918-54-2
Price: $22.00
Publishing Date: August 2004
Paperback ISBN: 1-929918-55-0
Price: $14.95
Publishing Date: August 2004

FormatPaperback , Hardcover

Publication DateAugust 1, 2004

ISBN1-929918-55-0

From $14.95

About the Author

Lucille Clifton (1936 - 2010) was an award winning poet, fiction writer, and author of children’s books. Her poetry collection, Blessing the Boats: New & Selected Poems 1988-2000 (BOA, 2000), won the National Book Award for Poetry. In 1988 she became the only author to have two collections selected in the same year as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (BOA, 1987), and Next: New Poems (BOA, 1987). In 1996, her collection The Terrible Stories (BOA, 1996), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Among her many other awards and accolades are the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Frost Medal, and an Emmy Award. In 2013, her posthumously published collection The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (BOA, 2012), was awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry.