Here [in Good News About the Earth] is Mrs. Clifton's deft, economical, poised lyricism moving with the directness of finely turned speech yet eschewing any sort of artificiality. Donald Hall has recently said that black poetry is "a poetry of reality", "of character, attending to qualities like courage, defiance and tenderness", and his words could find no better illustration than the work of Lucille Clifton. She focuses on the events of the day, the killings at Kent State, on black figures of prominence and tragedy;… and a desire for and evocation of her African heritage, in all its natural luxuriance, fills several poems. But Mrs. Clifton's poetic range goes beyond matters of black pride and tradition to embrace the entire world, human and non-human, in the deep affirmation she makes in the teeth of negative evidence. She is a master of her style, with its spare, elliptical, idiomatic...