SOURCE: A review of Two-Headed Woman, in Callaloo, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1983, pp. 160-62.

Below, poet and critic Waniek reviews the visionary and transcendent nature of Clifton's poems in Two-Headed Woman.

Lucille Clifton is a visionary poet. Her vision, however, is one of sanity, connectedness, light. She can write poems which are bright little gems of perceptive observation. As the mother of a large family (a fact important to much of her work) she may have been forced to work on small canvases. The result in her best poems, of which there are many, is similar to that of a laser beam. In Two-Headed Woman, her third collection of poetry, Clifton asserts her belief in personalism by affirming herself and her family and by exposing her exterior and interior lives to the the piercing light of her poems.

Clifton first pays "homage to mine" by affirming her decision to be...