University of Pittsburgh Press

The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

admin — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 14:23:00 +0000

Edited by Janet E. Kaufman, Anne F. Herzog

Before there was Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, there was Muriel Rukeyser. Before there were the Beats, there was Muriel Rukeyser. As Anne Sexton once pointed out, Rukeyser was the “mother of us all.” This is why a collection of her work is so important. Despite Rukeyser’s stature, and her prodigious output, she is not as often read or taught as her better known literary progeny. Furthermore, some of Rukeyser’s prime writing years were during the era of New Criticism, when politically charged poetry was not in vogue. Not only that, but according to the editors in their introductory note, the FBI had a file on Rukeyser that was over one hundred pages long. It wasn’t just the new formalist poets who turned a wary eye on her.

Even if Ginsberg, Plath, and Sexton are her inheritors, Rukeyser is different from them in that she is concerned with placing the self within a larger political, and more emotionally distanced, framework. A modernist with an obvious debt to Walt Whitman, she believed in the power of poetry to create positive political change. And if she has been somewhat overlooked, I think her time has come. Living as we are in the midst of a dangerous war, Rukeyser has the power to speak to us now. In her autobiographical poem, “Kathe Kollwitz,” her first lines are, “Held between wars/my lifetime/among wars, the big hands of the world of death.” Her concern with war resonates. Her poems “What Have You Brought Home from the Wars?,” “One Soldier,” and “Welcome from War” have something very personal to say to our time.

Rukeyser was also a feminist poet, and she is deeply concerned with what it means to be both a woman poet, and a woman in the world. And long before the Civil Rights era, Rukeyser was all-inclusive. Her poems “The Young Girl of the Mississippi Valley” and “Martin Luther King, Malcolm X,” evidence her interest in transcending her own experience as a white woman. In truth, Rukeyser is every type of poet—she wrote about sex, love, death, race, war, suicide, lesbian love, children, motherhood. Her breadth was profound. This collection of Rukeyser’s work should ensure her life within the canon. This she deserves.

Written by: Susan Melinde Dunlap, March 23rd 2007

Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918-1950

admin — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 13:07:00 +0000

By Melissa Feinberg

University of Pittsburgh Press

Melissa Feinberg’s must-read new book, Elusive Equality, chronicles in rich and sometimes dramatic detail the fascinating, though frequently distressing, events that marked Czech feminists’ struggle to implement the radical ideas of equality on which the Czechoslovak Republic was founded after the end of World War I. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of the new Republic, was a much-venerated utopian idealist who had studied John Stuart Mill with his American-born wife-to-be Charlotte Garrigue, whose last name he added to his own when they married. She translated The Subjection of Women into Czech and was a member of the influential Czech Women’s Club that brought together in Prague elite professional women such as educators, medical doctors, actresses and writers. Early Czech women’s groups tended to see Czech men as allies in the fight for political and national rights. Feinberg points out that a female candidate was elected to a provincial assembly even before woman suffrage was achieved in the state: “Czech men voted for a woman at the very time that Britain’s militant suffragettes were being brutalized and imprisoned.” Masaryk himself insisted that any true democracy must be based on recognition of the equality of all individuals.

The celebrated feminist leader Františka Plamínková praised "the old Czech virtues of love and democracy" and resistance to "any oppression." She and her colleagues did not make a distinction between supporting women and supporting democracy. Yet, despite their commitment to the ideal of gender equality, and despite the way that prominent male politicians promoted this idea, true equality of the sexes was never achieved in family law, job protection, or the problem of married women’s citizenship during the time of the Czech Republic. Deep-rooted attitudes to marriage and women’s duties prevailed. As one male reformer remarked, "I would not want...to change the civil code, which assigns a husband certain privileges...which we do not want to destroy."

Numerous Czech women, too, supported the old gender system, finding security in the fixed roles of wives and mothers. In the 1930’s a campaign for legalizing abortion aroused a backlash that seems to this reviewer quite similar to anti-ERA feelings in the United States in the 1970s. Politicians desperately trying to preserve the Czech nation in times of wars and economic crises were actually, concludes Feinberg, “in the process of hollowing out democracy itself.” Not even the sacrifices of Plamínková, executed as a resistance leader under the German occupation in 1942, and Milada Horáková, executed as an anti-Communist fighter in 1950, could preserve “the feminist hope for liberation via democracy.”

Plamínková was memorialized in 1947, but only after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989 was Horáková honored as a martyr to the cause of Czech freedom. Few today remember her work for women’s rights or, indeed, the whole history of the Czech feminist movement. Feinberg’s well-told cautionary tale serves as a reminder to readers and reformers everywhere that liberty for women and men is always in question and in danger.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, March 17th 2007

Domain of Perfect Affection

admin — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 12:38:00 +0000

By Robin Becker

University of Pittsburgh Press

The title of Robin Becker’s new book is contained in the last line of “Salon,” where the speaker’s mother goes for her weekly respite. In this “domain of perfect affection,” _ … my mother attends to the lifelong business of revealing and withholding, careful to frame each story while Vivienne lacquers each nail and then inspects each slender finger …

Such delicate observations permeate the straightforward observations throughout the collection. Few poets achieve this mastery: Becker makes everyday observations, everyday knowledge, extraordinary. This well-crafted collection shows a hard-earned perspective on contentment, containing numerous examples of what Stephen Dunn calls “credible poetry of affirmation,” and yet, almost as if to combat to that contentment, Becker throws in a number of poems that challenge what peace we have found. Among these poems are the two powerful found poems “Manifest Destinies” (taken from the journals of Lewis and Clark) and “Qualities Boys Like Best in Girls” (taken from a 1960s “home living” guide) and the bizarre, aggressive “Against Pleasure” (“Worry beats me to the kitchen/and all the food is sorry.”).

“The Drawer” perhaps exemplifies this conflict best—it is, fundamentally, a conflict of memory, being content and knowing that it was not always so, and therefore may not always be. In the poem, the speaker sorts through the contents of the drawer and the past, finding finally “photos of the woman/you love and a vial of sacred dirt from the church in Chimayo—/collected the summer you traveled with nothing but a backpack.” From this point, burdened and united with beloved objects, the speaker can see into the complex, often traumatic incidents that pepper the rest of the book.

Domain of Perfect Affection, as a collection, perhaps lacks some of the punch of Becker’s previous books, like Giacometti’s Dog and The Horse Fair, but, at the same time, seems more firmly about the business of living, about the information one must collect and process both to live from day to day and to instigate change. She creates calm and then upsets it, a stunning achievement for any poet.

Written by: Gemma Cooper-Novack, February 23rd 2007