Into History: A New Terrain of Women's Poetry

Abstract

Into HistoryA New Terrain of Women's Poetry Jacqueline Kolosov (bio) Sarah Kennedy, Home Remedies, Louisiana State University Press, 2009, 70 pp., $17.95 (paper). Frannie Lindsay, Mayweed, The Word Works, 2009, 76 pp., $15 (paper). Rebecca Foust, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, Wave Books, 2010, 80 pp., $15.95 (paper). Sara London, The Tyranny of Milk, Four Way Books, 2010, 100 pp., $15.95 (paper). The 1960s witnessed the confrontation of psychological and domestic issues by women poets, including Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; in the process such poets enlarged the scope of poetry and influenced generations of women poets who followed. Among this later generation is the Irish-born Eavan Boland, twelve years Plath's junior. Plath's "complex, radical poems of motherhood" transformed the possibilities of poetry for Boland, whose own work taps the cycle of living and dying and gives voice to those whose stories have traditionally not been told, specifically in the context of the more masculine, mythic poetry of Ireland: Out of myth into history I move to bepart of that ordealwhose darkness is only now reaching me from those fields,those rivers, those roads clottedas firmaments with the dead. [End Page 169] Home Remedies Sarah Kennedy, Louisiana State University Press, 2009, 70 pp., $17.95 (paper) This title poem from her collection Outside History (1990) speaks to two powerful impulses among women poets writing today. The first is the recognition that suffering is an inescapable part of the human condition. This recognition may carry with it anger, but in work that abides, anger gives way to something larger. Marie Howe's What the Living Do (1998) is another such collection, one that participated in a larger chronicle about the devastation and grief surrounding the AIDS epidemic. It is equally the story of a family's journey, portraying the love of the poet speaker for the brother whom she loses to the disease. What the Living Do has been described as confessional. Yet many of the poems speak to larger facets of human experience: the unalterable fact of death and the necessity of continuing to love through and beyond it. Tied to this discovery is the impulse to bring the collective to bear on the individual experience. It is an impulse that enables one to find the eternal in the mortal and the old in the new, so that "the soul of that moment … the common life we call autobiography," as Stanley Plumly so beautifully puts it in his essay "Autobiography and Archetype," comes to speak to more than the individual life. Among the four collections under review here, Sarah Kennedy's Home Remedies consciously makes the recovery of women's histories, and the texts women have created—recipe books, diaries, account books and wills—an integral part of the book's tripartite structure. Home Remedies is an account of things that have for too long lain "outside history." Respect for the eighteenth-century women whose lives she presents, as well as their domestic work, is inherent in her portraits, a fact that reveals just how far women poets have come in creating a distinctly female sphere in the last forty-five years. The selves of Home Remedies are all women, most middle-aged (though that meant something different in 1749 than it does now). The poems are largely anchored in the domestic and at times find the individual at a threshold in her life: Take "The Testament of Mary Gaskell Bagnoll," whom we first meet in I: The Jilting, 1791: [End Page 170] … Whitened by sun, the pleatsspread perfectly from beneath the tightband, and Mary curled her toes in the slippers to keep herself still. And yet he did notcome. … Adorned in her dead sister's bridal linen and veil, Mary waits, without hope, until the poem finds her again twenty-nine years later in II: In Sickness and in Health: 1820. By this time, Mary has married a man once ravaged by plague, so that "on their wedding night/she'd bathed his body with a poultice of bindweed." He healed, and with him she raised three children to adulthood. Home Remedies depends...