 The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010, by Marge Piercy.
What rots is taking for granted. So begins the first poem in this collection, "A guide to common lethal fungi." And indeed Piercy leaves nothing in her life unexamined: love, politics, Judaism, voice mail, aging, and cats. My own view on poetry is that it should be (1) understandable, and (2) actually about something. This may explain why Piercy is one of my long-time favorites. This collection includes poems from nine of her earlier books, plus 14 new poems. The personal meets the political in "What's that smell in the kitchen?" If she wants to serve him anything it's a dead rat with a bomb in its belly ticking like the heart of an insomniac. Her life is cooked and digested nothing but leftovers in Tupperware. Look, she says, once I was roast duck on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam. Burning dinner is not incompetence but war. After multiple loves and breakups, she writes about lasting love in "Bashert" (presumably written for her husband, Ira Wood): ...I was the juicy mango you bit into that day, and you are my sweet and my sour my past and my future, my best hope and my worst fear, my friend and brother and sparring partner. Chance or fate, we grasped what was offered us and we hold on. "The ark of consequence" possibly best sums up her political activism: Think of it as a promise that what we do continues in an arc of consequence, flickers in our children's genes, collects in each spine and liver, gleams in the apple, coats the down of the drowning auk. When you see the rainbow iridescence shiver in the oil slick, smeared on the waves of the poisoned river, shudder for the covenant broken, for we are given only this floating round ark with the dead moon for company and warning. In "The Art of blessing the day," she comes back to taking nothing for granted: ...I am not sentimental about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote with no more feeling than one says gesundheit. But the discipline of blessings is to taste each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet and the salty, and be glad for what does not hurt. The art is in compressing attention to each little and big blossom of the tree of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit, its savor, its aroma and its use. Attention is love, what we must give children, mothers, fathers, pets, our friends, the news, the woes of others. What we want to change we curse and then pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can with eyes and hands and tongue. If you can't bless it, get ready to make it new. Popsugar Reading Challenge: Paired prompt: two books by married or partnered authors. (Will be paired with You're Married to Her? by Ira Wood.) 52 Book Club Challenge: Paired prompt: two books by related authors. Booklist Queen Challenge: An author you love. This Challenge Killed the Bookworm: Such a fungi.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |