Lucille Clifton, in her third collection of poems, An Ordinary Woman, plays on [a] collective sense of déjà vu, by using the power of everyday objects. She records the riddle of the ordinary with deliberate irony. In the first poem in the book, "In Salem," the "black witches know" that terror is not in weird phases of the moon or the witches' broom or the "wild clock face":

     the terror is in the plain pink
     at the window
     and the hedges moral as fire
     and the plain face of the white woman watching us
     as she beats her ordinary bread.

This is an extraordinary "ordinary" poem, a homely and particular source of history, of memory, the bread rising as the witch burns and the sinister association made and given its full measure of terror and truth in the emphasis on ordinary—the word and the state of...