... slender but potent ... is not simply an account of Clifton’s father and the generations that preceded him, narrated upon her return to upstate New York for his funeral. It is also, metonymically, the account of all our histories, of the violence on which this nation is built, and of the individuals whose lives have long been unheralded and unrecorded ... Clifton’s prose has the distilled eloquence of poetry. She also has the gift of voices: she inhabits her father’s with an immediacy that makes him seem alive ... The music of her father’s words is both conversational and poetic, and Clifton’s particular achievement is to render the two as one, life as lyric, without prettifying or sentimentalizing.
By using an iconic American author as the anchor of her narrative, Clifton includes her own family’s history in the American canon ... The lives of the enslaved and their descendants are marked not only by hardship but celebration, heartbreak, quiet, the living. This cacophony of life is heard in Clifton’s memoir as the dead narrate and conjure their dead and bring to life an American family ... Clifton’s dead come alive, are present, and take a seat at the table ... her narrative humanizes the enslaved, her family. Her assemblage of voices of the enslaved and their descendants calls into question the language and standards for how we remember them ... a lean book, inviting readers to get through it even in one sitting. In five short chapters, Clifton includes historic family photos, usually at the beginning of each chapter. The cover art features dynamic black and white figures connected by lines. The figures seem to be in motion, which points to the liveliness of the history here retold.
Prize, the judges wrote that 'One always feels the looming humaneness around Lucille Clifton’s poems—it is a moral quality that some poets have and some don’t.' In Generations, readers will see that her prose—economical, matter-of-fact, and indelible—has that quality as well.
Clifton (1936–2010) distills centuries of family history with the same potent, easy eloquence that has placed her among the first rank of American poets ... Clifton then considers her own parents with a voice beautifully poised between her commanding father’s loquacious swagger and the egoless embrace of her selfless loving mother, who burned all of her own poems ... Clifton is one of our great truth-tellers, and this work stands among her best. Elegiac and celebratory, unfussy and profound, full of pain and healing and thanks for the ties that hold, this slim memorial contains multitudes, and every word of it is true, 'even the lies.'
You can easily see the reflection of her tight, spare poetry in this exceedingly compact book, which is all the more affecting for its light touch and suggestive sketches of all the American Sayles, including a few of the white ones. ''Slavery was terrible,'' says her Daddy, ''but we fooled them old people. We come out of it better than they did.'' Here's the proof.
