For someone like myself, who writes in a language she was not born into, the second language assumes and retains a special fascination. We absorb our first language long before we speak it, and we learn to speak it fluently without ever becoming conscious of the learning process. The second language – in my case…
Consciousness and Community in Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 Adrienne Rich has explored the relationship of personal and political consciousness in her poetry for the past 25 years. She has achieved a new synthesis of private and public experience in her most recent work, The Dream of a Common Language:…
In a world full of mangoes, hurricanes, armchairs and muskrats, how does a poet choose just two things for an original and truthful comparison? How does he select two things that are similar but not too similar? Good metaphors must surprise us by their unexpected combinations but they must still hang together; A must, in…
(Ecco Press, $6.95) This poetry, intelligent and delicately worded, full of hard appraisals, has as its objects and experiences the domestic and traditional: gray '43 pennies, landscapes and eyesight, local wisdom, family history and neighborhood, marriage and children, friends and poetry itself. Her subject is her own vision, intelligent and emotional, in which an exciting…
James Wright. To a Blossoming Pear Tree. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. 62 pp. $7.95. Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Mother Poem. Oxford University Press, 1977. 117 pp. $6.50. Barry Goldensohn. Uncarving the Block. Vermont Crossroads Press, 1977. 62 pp. No price listed. Jane Shore. Eye Level. University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. 86 pp. No price listed….
I too have favorite candidates for whatever literature of the 1970's ought to survive. The poems of Amon Liner and James Applewhite ought to last on, and Marguerite Yourcenar's novel The Abyss and Mary Lee Settle's Blood Tie, and the stories of Eve Shelnutt. I have no real confidence that these works will survive. Almost…
The poems of Joyce Peseroff are a great pleasure to read. Many of them (though I will not try to illustrate this here) are very funny; and many of them enter the mind with a persistent force that is startling. "Startling" seems right because Peseroff's way of writing does not involve the loud noises or…
"Where there is room for error," Charles Martin writes, meditating on the past which has been forged by the articulation of the bones of dinosaurs at the Brooklyn Museum, "there is room for us." It is very much the theme of these poems and the ruined, ruinous, funny and terrifying world they conjure. Martin was…
Robert B. Shaw's Comforting the Wilderness (Wesleyan, 1977) deserves attention not only because it is a very good first collection of poems, but also because it raises the question of where American poetry is going at the moment. It exemplifies, I think, a gradual revival of interest in the well-made poem. Since Robert Lowell and…
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