My Mother's Body

by PIERCY, MARGE

• ISBN13: 9780394729459
• ISBN10: 0394729455
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1985-03-12
• Publisher: Knopf

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 ally 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 serf and connection with the mother. In all, My Mother's Body is one of Piercy's most powerful and balanced collections.

Author Biography

Marge Piercy is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, including The Art of Blessing the Day; Early Grrrl; Mars and Her Children, My Mother’s Body; Available Light; Stone, Paper, Knife; The Moon Is Always Female; and her selected poems, Circles on the Water. Her book of craft essays, Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt, is part of the Poets on Poetry series of the University of Michigan Press, and she edited a poetry anthology, Early Ripening. In 1990 her poetry won the Golden Rose, the oldest poetry award in the country. She has written fourteen novels, including He, She and It (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award), The Longings of Women and City of Darkness, City of Light. The novel Storm Tide, co-authored with her husband, Ira Wood, was published in June 1998. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into sixteen languages. She and her husband live on Cape Cod.

Table of Contents

What Remains	p. 1
They inhabit me	p. 3
The Annuity	p. 6
Waking one afternoon in my best dress	p. 9
Out of the rubbish	p. 11
Of pumpkins and ghosts I sing	p. 14
Unbuttoning	p. 16
The sun and the moon in the morning sky of Charlotte	p. 18
Putting the good things away	p. 20
The Crunch	p. 23
What remains	p. 24
My mother's body	p. 26
The Chuppah	p. 33
Witnessing a wedding	p. 35
Touch tones	p. 37
The place where everything changed	p. 38
What Makes It Good?	p. 40
Why marry at all?	p. 42
We Come Together	p. 44
Every leaf is a mouth	p. 46
The Wine	p. 47
The Chuppah	p. 49
How we make nice	p. 51
House-keeping	p. 52
Return of the prodigal darling	p. 54
Down	p. 56
House built of breath	p. 58
The infidelity of sleep	p. 59
Nailing up the mezuzah	p. 61
Chiaroscuro	p. 63
The good go down	p. 65
Homage to Lucille, Dr. Lord-Heinstein	p. 69
Where is my half-used tube of Tom's fennel toothpaste tonight?	p. 71
Your cats are your children	p. 72
Mr. Big	p. 74
The maternal instinct at work	p. 76
Magic mama	p. 78
Nothing more will happen	p. 80
Blue Tuesday in August	p. 81
The Disinherited	p. 82
Cold head, cold heart	p. 84
Deferral	p. 85
Breaking out	p. 86
Paper birds	p. 88
Listening to a speech	p. 89
Making a will	p. 91
Still life	p. 93
From HoJo's to Mr. Softee	p. 94
The longings of women	p. 95
Out of sight	p. 96
Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?	p. 98
Underrated Pleasures	p. 105
Building is taming	p. 107
Cowering in a corner	p. 109
The Listmaker	p. 110
Going into town in the storm	p. 112
The clumsy season	p. 114
Silk confetti	p. 116
And whose creature am I?	p. 117
In praise of gazebos	p. 118
The Faithless	p. 120
If I had been called Sabrina or Ann, she said	p. 122
The night the moon got drunk	p. 123
Sweet ambush	p. 124
The high arch of summer	p. 126
What we fail to notice	p. 127
Tashlich	p. 128
This small and intimate place	p. 130
How grey, how wet, how cold	p. 133
Deer couchant	p. 135
Peaches in November	p. 136
Six underrated pleasures	p. 137
Folding sheets	p. 137
Picking pole beans	p. 137
Taking a hot bath	p. 138
Sleeping with cats	p. 139
Planting bulbs	p. 141
Canning	p. 142
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