Lucille Clifton, who died on February 13, relied on her subtle, extraordinary imagination to turn everyday words and commonplace constructions into unforgettable images and powerful poems. Sonnets, villanelles, and the other fanciful embroideries of rhythm and rhyme she left to others, preferring to fill out her lines with reality, with sadness, and most memorably with humor and warmth.

I heard her read several times, and even if I was sitting 20 rows back in a huge tent at a poetry festival, even if she was reading works in which she had instilled astonishing pain, I always came away feeling as if I'd been befriended by both the poems and the poet. In my mind, I can still hear her reading one of her best-loved poems, "homage to my hips," in a slow, rich voice that polished every syllable. The poem ends like this:

these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

The full texts of that poem and others are available on the Web site of the Poetry Foundation. I'd also particularly recommend reading "jasper texas 1998," after which you will never again doubt poetry's power.

Ms. Clifton, who retired three years ago as a professor of the humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2000 for her book Blessing the Boats: New and Collected Poems, 1988-2000, and won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2007. She was 73 when she died. —Lawrence Biemiller