"Love," "grace," "mystery," "survive," "strong," "good" and "wise"—these almost ineffectual words blur too much of Lucille Clifton's new book with the endearing title "An Ordinary Woman"; but when this "ordinary woman" turns to Kali, who presides over the bloodier poems, the words rise and tug at their subjects…. Clifton's poems on herself and her mother are items from a continuing story of mothers and daughters that is only now just beginning to be told in verse (and may turn out to be as interesting as the old story of fathers and sons)…. Memories rise up of a conflict no less strong for being gently told…. More bluntly than other recent poets, Clifton puts into raw lines the peculiar body and feeling of daily female life, so inimical to ideology, "ideas," social "thought" and even the art of words:

                 Sometimes
                 the whole world of women
                 seems a landscape...