My mother's body / by Marge Piercy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Piercy, Marge.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

ix, 143 pages ; 21 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Knopf, 1985.

Summary:

My Mother's Body, Marge Piercy's tenth book of poetry, takes its title from one of her strongest and most moving poems, the climax of a powerful sequence of poems to her mother. Rooted in an honest, harrowing, but finally ecstatic confrontation of the mother / daughter relationship in all its complexity and intimacy, it is at the same time an affirmation of continuity and identification. "The Chuppah" comprises poems actually used in her wedding ceremony with Ira Wood. This section sings with powerfully female love poetry. There is also a sustained and direct use of her Jewish identity and faith in these poems, as there is in a number of other poems throughout the volume.

Readers of Piercy's previous collections will not be surprised to encounter her mixture of the personal and the political, her love of animals and the Cape landscape. There are poems about doing housework, about accidents, about dreaming, about bag ladies, about luggage, about children's fears of nuclear holocaust; about tomcats, insects in the rafters, the influence of a name, appleblossoms and blackberries, pollution, and some of the ways women objectify one another. In "Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?" Piercy writes with lacerating honesty about our relationships with the elderly and about hers with her father. Some of the most moving poems are domestic, as in the final sequence, "Six underrated pleasures," which finds in daily women's tasks both pleasure and mystery, affirmation of self and connection with the mother. In all, My Mother's Body is one of Piercy's most powerful and balanced collections.

Contents:

What Remains 1

They inhabit me 3

The Annuity 6

Waking one afternoon in my best dress 9

Out of the rubbish 11

Of pumpkins and ghosts I sing 14

Unbuttoning 16

The sun and the moon in the morning sky of Charlotte 18

Putting the good things away 20

The Crunch 23

What remains 24

My mother's body 26

The Chuppah 33

Witnessing a wedding 35

Touch tones 37

The place where everything changed 38

What Makes It Good? 40

Why marry at all? 42

We Come Together 44

Every leaf is a mouth 46

The Wine 47

The Chuppah 49

How we make nice 51

House-keeping 52

Return of the prodigal darling 54

Down 56

House built of breath 58

The infidelity of sleep 59

Nailing up the mezuzah 61

Chiaroscuro 63

The good go down 65

Homage to Lucille, Dr. Lord-Heinstein 69

Where is my half-used tube of Tom's fennel toothpaste tonight? 71

Your cats are your children 72

Mr. Big 74

The maternal instinct at work 76

Magic mama 78

Nothing more will happen 80

Blue Tuesday in August 81

The Disinherited 82

Cold head, cold heart 84

Deferral 85

Breaking out 86

Paper birds 88

Listening to a speech 89

Making a will 91

Still life 93

From HoJo's to Mr. Softee 94

The longings of women 95

Out of sight 96

Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light? 98

Underrated Pleasures 105

Building is taming 107

Cowering in a corner 109

The Listmaker 110

Going into town in the storm 112

The clumsy season 114

Silk confetti 116

And whose creature am I? 117

In praise of gazebos 118

The Faithless 120

If I had been called Sabrina or Ann, she said 122

The night the moon got drunk 123

Sweet ambush 124

The high arch of summer 126

What we fail to notice 127

Tashlich 128

This small and intimate place 130

How grey, how wet, how cold 133

Deer couchant 135

Peaches in November 136

Six underrated pleasures 137

1 Folding sheets 137

2 Picking pole beans 137

3 Taking a hot bath 138

4 Sleeping with cats 139

5 Planting bulbs 141

6 Canning 142.

ISBN:

0394543432

OCLC:

11443616