SOURCE: Bennett, Bruce. “Preservation Poets.” New York Times Book Review (1 March 1992): 22-3.

In the following review of Quilting: Poems, 1987-1990, Bennett examines the central themes of each of the work's five sections.

Readers familiar with Ms. Clifton will find in Quilting, her seventh book of poetry, the kind of work they expect from her: poems of witness on racial themes; celebrations of women; personal poems of self, family and her vocation as poet; visionary poems taking off from the Bible. She is a passionate, mercurial writer, by turns angry, prophetic, compassionate, shrewd, sensuous, vulnerable and funny.

The title and construction of Quilting suggest its strategy; four of the book's five sections—“Log Cabin,” “Catalpa Flower,” “Eight-Pointed Star” and “Tree of Life”—are named for traditional quilt designs and represent a stitching together of various, and varicolored, pieces of an individual life (the fifth section, “Prayer,” consists of a...