Wednesday, November 29, 2017

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 

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