Lucille Clifton’s prose memoir generations was obviously not her sole autobiographical text. Throughout her body of work, she draws from her personal life, family history, and even generational history, writing about her great-grandmother Caroline Donald—called “Mammy Ca’line” in generations as that is what Clifton’s father Samuel always called his grandmother—in her earliest poems, collected in good times. But even if it wasn’t the only place she wrote about her family, generations was the most extended view of her family in her published corpus, and the only prose. This text offers sustained and significant clarity on the various figures who appear only briefly in poems, often in single episodes.
The book was released in 1976, the same year as Alex Haley’s more famous Roots. It was a time when a new generation…
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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, November/December 2023