The Work Women Do

Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English

                 

Philip Davis, in the introduction to his recent biography of George Eliot, states that “Literature is transmitted being.” It is an expression I love and one that seems ideal for describing the poems in this fine collection, each of which, if variously, seems an attempt to do just that, to transmit one’s life as it is lived and felt in a particular moment, in a particular place, in a particular frame of heart or mind. Consisting of the work of over 250 contributors, the poems vary greatly in style and form, and cover subjects as wide-ranging as love, loss, marriage, betrayal, memory, work, childhood, politics, race, religion, language, war, history, exile, displacement, identity, nature, longing, and death.

Opening the collection at random, I read this poem first:

The Shipfitter’s Wife

I loved him most

when he came home from work,

his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,

his denim shirt ringed with sweat,

smelling of salt, the drying weeds

of the ocean. I’d go to where he sat

on the edge of the bed, his forehead

anointed with grease, his cracked  hands

jammed between his thighs, and unlace

the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles

and calves, the pads and bones of his feet.

Then I’d open his clothes and take

the whole day inside me—the ship’s

gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,

the voice of the foreman clanging

off the hull’s silver ribs. Spark of lead

kissing metal. The clamp, the winch,

the white fire of the torch, the whistle,

and the long drive home.

                                  Dorianne Laux

Sujata Bhatt

Brazilian Fazenda

The day all the slaves were freed

their manacles, anklets

left on the window ledge to rust in the moist air

and all the coffee ripened

like beads on a bush or balls of fire

as merry as Christmas

and the cows all calved and the calves all lived

such a moo.

On the wide verandah where birds in cages

snag among the bell flowers

I in a bridal hammock

white and tasseled

whistled

and bits fell out of the sky near Nossa Senhora

who had walked all the way in bare feet from Bahia

and the chapel was lit by a child’s

fistful of marigolds on the red velvet altar

thrown like a golden ball.

Oh, let me come back on a day

when nothing extraordinary happens

so I can stare

at the sugar white pillars

and black lace grills

of this pink house.

                                P.K. Page

June Jordan

Muriel Rukeyser

Moving

Sit down among the boxes and write a poem,

he told me; obedient, I’m writing.

Moving house, he said, is such an ordinary

thing to do—a regular activity,

especially for you—no obligation

to unpack at once or be dutiful.

Find a vacant corner and there among

half-empty cartons spilling crumpled paper,

piles of sofa cushions and rolled-up carpets,

dining chairs like acrobatic couples

or swimmers, chest to chest, one pair of legs

trialing through water, the other flailing air,

and think about important things—not builders,

plumbers, electricians. I try to remember

how it began, this restlessness: a lifetime

trying to feel at home. A need and hope, he

hints, which might be programmed in my genes,

bred in the bone—nothing to do with him—

and makes me realise again those complex

ties that hold us together: everywhere,

both of us are strangers. Then: “Let’s open

a bottle of wine and drink a toast to life,”

he smiles and holds me close, “then go upstairs.”

Why not? I ponder, putting the poem aside.

                                       Ruth Fainlight

Kay Ryan

Lucille Clifton

Resonance

The universe is sad.

I heard it when Artur Rubenstein played the piano.

He was a little man with small hands.

We were bombing Germany by then.

I went to see him in a dark warehouse

Where a piano had been placed for his practice—

Or whatever he did before a recital.

He signed the book I had with me—

It was called Warsaw Ghetto.

I later heard about him—

His affairs with young women

—if only I had known—but I was

in love with you.

Artur is dead;

And you, my darling,

The imprint of your face, alert like a deer—

oh god, it is eaten away—

The earth has taken it back

But I listen to Artur—

He springs out of the grave—

His genius wired to this tape—

A sad trick of the neural pathways, resonating flesh

And my old body remembers the way you touched me.

                                                     Ruth Stone

Vona Groarke 

Anne Sexton

  

Skin

The men wore human skins

but removed them at night

and fell to the bottom of darkness

like crows without wings.

War was the perfect disguise.

Their mothers would not have known them,

and the swarming flies could not find them.

When they met a sprit in the forest

it thought they were bags of misfortune

and walked away

without taking their lives.

In this way, they tricked the deer.

It had wandered into the forest at night,

thinking antlers of trees

were other deer.

If I told you the deer was a hide of light

you wouldn’t believe it, or that it was a hunting song

that walked out of a diviner’s bag

sewn from human skin.

I knew it could pass

through the bodies of men and could return.

It knew the arrow belonged to the bow,

and that men only think they are following

the deaths of animals

or other men

when they are walking into the fire.

That’s why fire is restless

and smoke has become

the escaped wings of crows,

why war is only another skin,

and hunting,

and why men are just the pulled-back curve of the bow.

                                                      Linda Hogan

Mimi Khalvati

  

Mrs Darwin

7 April 1852

Went to the Zoo.

I said to Him—

Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of

      You.

                                                  Carol Ann Duffy 

Janet Frame

This remarkably engaging collection was edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack. Enjoy. 

*The lead photograph is of poet, Judith Wright

Peter Adam Nash