Summary

Winner of the 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize About Marge Piercy's collection of her old and new poems that celebrate the Jewish experience, the poet Lyn Lifshin writes: "The Art of Blessing the Dayis an exquisite book. The whole collection is strong, passionate, and poignant, but the mother and daughter poems, fierce and emotional, with their intense ambivalence, pain and joy, themes of separation and reconnecting, are among the very strongest about that difficult relationship. "These striking, original, beautifully sensuous poems do just that. Ordinary moments--a sunset, a walk, a private religious ritual--are so alive in poems like 'Shabbat moment' and 'Rosh Hodesh.' In the same way that she celebrates ordinary moments, small things become charged with memories and feelings: paper snowflakes, buttons, one bird, a bottle-cap flower made from a ginger ale top and crystal beads. "She celebrates the body in rollicking, gusto-filled poems like 'Belly good' and 'The chuppah,' where 'our bodies open their portals wide.' So much that is richly sensuous: 'hands that caressed you, . . . untied the knot of pleasure and loosened your flesh till it fluttered,' and lush praise for 'life in our spines, our throats, our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues.' "I love the humor in poems like 'Eat fruit,' the nostalgia and joy in 'The rabbi's granddaughter and the Christmas tree,' the fresh, beautiful images of nature--'In winter . . .the sun hangs its wizened rosehip in the oaks.' "I admire Piercy's sense of the past alive in the present, in personal and social history. The poems are memorials, like the yahrtzeit candle in a glass. 'We lose and we go on losing,' but the poems are never far from harsh joy, the joy that is 'the wine of life.' "Growing up haunted by Holocaust ghosts is an echo throughout the book, and some of the strongest poems are about the Holocaust, poems that become the voices of those who had no voice: 'What you carry in your blood is us, the books we did not write, music we could not make, a world gone from gristle to smoke, only as real now as words can make it.' "Marge Piercy's words make such a moving variety of experiences beautifully and forcefully real."

Author Biography

The Art of Blessing the Day is Marge Piercy's fifteenth volume of poetry. Others include What Are Big Girls Made Of?; The Moon Is Always Female; her selected poems, Circles on the Water; My Mother's Body; Available Light; and, new from Leapfrog Press, Early Grrrl, her out-of-print and previously uncollected early poems. In 1990 her poetry won the Golden Rose, the oldest poetry award in the country. She has also written fourteen novels, all still in print, including Woman on the Edge of Time; Vida; Gone to Soldiers; He, She and It (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award); The Longings of Women; City of Darkness, City of Light; and, most recently,

The art of blessing the day

(9)

MISHPOCHEH (Family)

Snowflakes, my mother called them

(2)

Putting the good things away

(3)

Eat fruit

(2)

Learning to read

(3)

My mother's body

(7)

On shabbat she dances in the candle flames

(2)

The wicked stepmother

(3)

The rabbi's granddaughter and the Christmas tree

(2)

What she craved

(1)

Unbuttoning

(2)

Out of the rubbish

(3)

Your father's fourth heart attack

(2)

The aunt I wanted to be

(2)

The flying Jew

(3)

My rich uncle, whom I only met three times

(2)

A candle in a glass

(2)

Belly good

(5)

THE CHUPPAH (Marriage)

The chuppah

(2)

The wine

(2)

House built of breath

(1)

Nailing up the mezuzah

(2)

In the grip of the solstice

(2)

The real hearth

(1)

All lovers have secret names

(1)

Marriage in winter

(5)

TIKKUN OLAM (Repair of the World)

The ark of consequence

(2)

To be of use

(2)

Available light

(3)

For she is a tree of life

(2)

One bird, if there is only one, dies in the night

(2)

Yahrtzeit

(1)

After the wind abated, he walked out and died

(2)

Woman in a shoe

(2)

Up and out

(7)

The task never completed

(5)

TOLDOT, MIDRASHIM (Of History and Interpretation)

Apple sauce for Eve

(2)

The Book of Ruth and Naomi

101

(2)

Fathers and sons

103

(1)

At the well

104

(4)

Growing up haunted

108

(2)

The thief

110

(2)

For each age, its amulet

112

(1)

The Altneushul in the old Prague ghetto

113

(2)

Returning to the cemetery in the old Prague ghetto

115

(3)

The housing project at Drancy

118

(2)

Black Mountain

120

(2)

The fundamental truth

122

(2)

The hunger moon

124

(5)

TEFILLAH (Prayer)

Nishmat

129

(3)

S'hema

132

(2)

Meditation before reading Torah

134

(1)

Amidah: On our feet we speak to you

135

(3)

Kaddish

138

(1)

Havdalah

139

(4)

HA-SHANAH (The Year)

Shabbat moment

143

(2)

At the New Moon: Rosh Hodesh

145

(2)

Wellfleet shabbat

147

(1)

The head of the year

148

(1)

Tashlich

149

(2)

Breadcrumbs

151

(2)

The New Year of the Trees

153

(1)

Beytzeh: Season of the egg

154

(2)

Charoset

156

(2)

Zeroah: Lamb shank

158

(1)

Maror

159

(2)

Karpas

161

(2)

Chazeret: Lettuce in rebellion

163

(1)

Matzoh

164

(1)

Salt water

165

(1)

Maggid

166

(2)

Summer mourning

168

(2)

Coming up on September

170

(2)

The ram's horn sounding

172

Supplemental Materials

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Excerpts

"Growing Up Haunted"

When I enter through the hatch of
memory those claustrophobic chambers,
my adolescence in the booming fifties of
General Eisenhower, General Foods and
General Motors, I see our dreams:
obsolescent mannequins in Dior frocks
armored, prefabricated bodies; and I see
our nightmares, powerful as a wine red
sky and wall of fire.

Fear was the underside of every leaf
we turned, the knowledge that our
cousins, our other selves, had been
starved and butchered to ghosts.
The question every smoggy morning
presented like a covered dish:
why are you living and all those
mirror selves, sisters, gone
into smoke like stolen cigarettes?

I remember my grandmother's cry
when she learned the death of all she
remembered, girls she bathed with,
young men with whom she shyly
flirted, wooden shul where
her father rocked and prayed,
red haired aunt plucking the
balalaika, world of sun and snow
turned to shadows on a yellow page.

Assume no future you may not have
to fight for, to die for, muttered
ghosts gathered on the foot
of my bed each night. What you
carry in your blood is us,
the books we did not write,
music we could not make, a world
gone from gristle to smoke, only
as real now as words can make it.

Excerpted from The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme by Marge Piercy
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.