Author Description

Product Description A collection of poems and narrative lyrics explores the lives of women, contemporary politics, and society as it approaches the millenium From Library Journal "Few poets write with as much intelligence and sophistication" (LJ 7/96). Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Kizer is a breathtakingly adroit formalist who can spin out pantoum, sonnet, villanelle, or terza rima seemingly effortlessly. Of course, content and attitude are what make poems compelling, and humanitarian radical and long-haul feminist Kizer offers plenty of those to animate her technical brio. The cruelties of this century are her primary concerns, and she takes them personally. For her, to meditate, in "The Valley of the Fallen," upon the Spanish civil war is to recall how consciousness of that rehearsal for fascist world conquest shaped her life and could shape love, too. Making, in "Marriage Song," her own rendering of an ancient Chinese lyric, she incorporates into her poem "pseudo-scholarly commentary" that questions the androcentric twists the Chinese text, quite probably written by a woman, has been given by even great male translators. Elsewhere, Kizer is full of fun, as in "In Hell with Virg and Dan," her take on the seventeenth canto of Dante's Inferno, cast in "Antique Hipster" patois--her method for shaking off stiff "translatese." The rest of the collection is as rich in emotion as those three poems, as elegant in technique: engaging, multifaceted, magnetically re-readable. Ray Olson Review Maryam What Is True Tirade For The Next-to-last Act An American Beauty Anniversaries: Claremont Avenue From 1945 Arthur's Party Cultural Evolution Election Day, 1984 Fearful Women Fin-de-siecle Blues Gerda Halation In Hell With Virg And Dan: Canto 17 Index, A Mountain Ingathering Lost In Translation<b