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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 811.54 PIE | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
What Are Big Girls Made Of? is full of poems - funny, serious, angry, delightful - that illumine the experience of being a woman. The title poem is a lament for women who allow themselves to be caught in the painful dilemma of being retooled, refitted and redesigned to match the style of every decade. Others extol the salty pleasures of middle age: making love with a familiar and adored partner; the ease with which one comes to accept one's body - a good belly, for example, is a maternal cushion radiating comfort, handed down from mother to daughter like a prize feather quilt. Some of the book's most beautiful poems are about the precarious balance of nature: white butterflies mating in Labor Day morning steam (a poem for Rosh Hashana); a little green snake slithering back to the camouflage safety of grass; the cool song of an October lunar eclipse, as opposed to the dangerous implications of the sun's disappearance; the death of an exquisite doe. Appropriately, from a poet who so winningly celebrates life in all its many variations, the book ends with the moving and simple The Art of Blessing the Day: Bless whatever you can/with eyes and hands and tongue. If you/can't bless it, get ready to make it new.
Author Notes
Poet and novelist Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan on March 31, 1936. She received a B. A. from the University of Michigan and an M. A. from Northwestern. She is involved in the Jewish renewal and political work and was part of the civil rights movement. She won the Arthur C. Clarke award. Besides writing her own novels and collections of poetry, she has collaborated with her husband Ira Wood on a play, The Last White Class, and a novel, Storm Tide. In 1997, they founded a small literary publishing company called the Leapfrog Press. She currently lives in Cape Cod.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Booklist Review
The answer to the question posed by the title of this substantial poetry collection is found in a poem of the same name, and it is pain: the pain of struggling to meet fashion's impossible criteria. Piercy has a lot to say about our mania for conformity, whether it comes to self-image or politics, and, as she has over the course of writing 12 earlier books of poetry and several novels, she considers these issues within the context of a culture that fears the body's appetites, cycles, and imperfections, especially when it comes to women. She writes, in "Trying Our Metal," that she likes silver "not just for the moony glint / but because it tarnishes," reminding readers of the inevitability of change. The demanding give-and-take of marriage interests her far more than mere infatuation; in "Salt in the Afternoon," for instance, she celebrates the eroticism of enduring love. Piercy's poems are straight-ahead and socially conscious, but they are also as bright and tangy as fresh berries. --Donna Seaman
