Harping On by Carolyn Kizer

Marilyn Hacker recommends
Harping On, poems by Carolyn Kizer: “Carolyn Kizer’s magisterial new book is a world citizen’s witty and lyrical meditations on many of the major events of this century, from the intimate perspective of someone who was there. As she re/members herself in sentences and stanzas-the seventeen-year-old observing Einstein; the twenty-year-old hearing of Roosevelt’s death on her way to a Chinese lesson in Manhattan; the mature woman, recalling her youth, tempted to spit on Franco’s tomb-readers find a poetry which resolves dichotomies: personal/political; form/content; memory/immediacy. Polyglot, a gifted translator, Kizer often has as subtext the untrustworthiness of mediated language-but her own readers are in fiable, skilled hands.” (Copper Canyon)