Michael Collier, Stanley Plumly, Jane Shore, Lucille Clifton: Great poets of D.C. area

the great old hardwoods letting go

their various scarlet, yellow,

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(BOA) - “The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010” by Lucille Clifton.

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• Four poets who shake us awake
• Magicians of language
• A life told through favorite poems

and leopard-spotted leaves one by one.

“Glenn Gould” moves with tremendous agility from each thought, image or memory to the next, while leaving the deepest connections implicit. In a similar way, “The Best Years of Our Lives” weaves together Plumly’s recollections of his parents with the plot of that 1946 filmand memories of first seeing it with his grandmother. The poem is a masterpiece about a masterpiece. Indeed, every poem in “Orphan Hours” is masterful, and I hope this collection helps bring Plumly, one of our best poets, the wider attention he has deserved for a long time.

3Jane Shore’s poetry leaves the events of the larger world mostly untouched, focusing almost exclusively on memories of parents and other relatives, of childhood experiences, of her marriage and of the experience of raising her child. The domestic territories surveyed in That Said (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $22) feel familiar, perhaps overly familiar: One would like to see these modest anecdotes pushed a bit into unexpected areas, to manifest a bit more complexity, ambivalence or doubt. There are, here and there, memorable passages. I liked, for example, the conclusion of “Workout,” a poem about a beautiful younger sibling:

Like a dress handed down

from sister to sister,

in time one body will inherit

what the other has outgrown.

Shore, who teaches at George Washington University, writes poems that are pleasant and accessible, and there will be many who enjoy them, but the cost of their accessibility is their unwillingness to challenge or trouble their readers. Insulated from the larger landscape of history and thus from any possibility of historical resonance, these individual stories feel small indeed. People sometimes complain about the difficulty and obscurity of contemporary poetry, but a self-contained poem whose author’s intentions, meanings and methods are completely apparent is unlikely to haunt us or linger long in our minds.

4Lucille Clifton’s poems, on the other hand, tend to look simple but usually aren’t. Clifton, who died in 2010, engaged both the personal and the political in her work and often made it hard to tell one from the other. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 , coming next month (BOA, $35), contains more than 700 pages of poetry, including three substantial sections of poems not previously available in book form.

Clifton, a National Book Award winner who taught at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, was an African American poet in the obvious sense: That is, she was African American and a poet. Moreover, much of her work explicitly concerns the African American experience. Yet that characterization is limiting and unfair: Clifton’s concerns, particularly in the later stages of her career, extended beyond the interests or history of any particular cultural community.

The early pieces are small, precise and chiseled. Their short lines, lack of capitalization and fragmented diction now seem emblematic of a certain sort of socially aware poetry arising out of the ’60s. As her work evolved, one of her innovations was to use many of these formal features to express an increasingly broad scope of voices, drawn from history, from myth, from her copious imagination:

“people who are going to be / in a few years / bottoms of trees / bear a responsibility to something / besides people,” she writes in “generations,” a poem from her first book. It’s a good message, and one still worth paying attention to. Clifton was a prolific, always interesting, sometimes fascinating poet, and her “Collected Poems” is a gift, not just for her fans — although they will surely appreciate having the previously uncollected work — but for all of us.

Jollimore, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2006, is the author of “At Lake Scugog: Poems” and two books of philosophy: “Love’s Vision” and “On Loyalty.”