Forgiving my father by Lucille Clifton
             New criticism emphasizes in a close examination of a text with minimum consideration or none for the biographical or historical circumstances in which it was produced. Doing a new criticism work we have to have in mind the tensions, ironies, paradoxes, oppositions, and the ambiguities that could be found in the poem.
             In the first stanza I can see the ambiguity in the word paying. This could mean to pay a bill or to pay some one a debt of money that is owed. Lucille Clifton really means here that there is a daughter in her father's grave grieving because she wants to forgive her father for the bad treatment she and her mother received from him.
             In the second stanza the irony is seen by the way she talks to her father, for example, "there is no more time for you. There will never be time enough daddy, daddy, old lecher old liar." The tone in this stanza changes to express anger, irony and hatred. Why so much anger irony and hatred towards her father. I think is because she was sexually abused by her father since she calls him "old lecher". In the last stanza she refers to her mother and to her father by saying "you were each other's bad bargain, not mine." I believe that what she means here is that her mother new what her father was doing to her daughter, (sexual abuse) but that her mother was terribly afraid of her husband that she couldn't help her daughter. "Not mine" she does not hold bad feeling against her mother.
             The paradox of forgiving and not forgiving is shown in the way she tells her father "I wish you were rich so I could take it all and give the lady what she was due." Here I can understand why her anger goes so far. If her father had been rich she would had taken that money for her mother's burial and to make it very pleasant. In this stanza Clifton gives a very good description of the father...