Review by Booklist Review
Piercy is a poet of womanhood and compassion, conscience and spirit, and her poems are as magnetic as mirrors: no one can resist them, and all, at least every woman, will catch a glimpse of themselves in their warm and dancing light. In The Art of Blessing the Day, Piercy has assembled new and selected poems that reflect Jewish life as she has known it, both in the bosom of her family and out in a world hostile to the tradition. Piercy writes both of an inherited sense of Jewishness and of a faith she has come to live within, bringing to it her passions for language and justice. Piercy portrays her grandmother and her mother, her father and her uncle, using, in one poem, buttons in a tin as mnemonic devices to call up visions of the past. She dwells often on the blessings of food and of contact with people, pets, and the wilder world outdoors. Every thought and metaphor is fluid with life and sensuality yet contained by good sense and humor. These are the work of a practiced poet, but it is obvious from the bright, saucy, and shrewd early poems collected in Early Grrrl that Piercy's gift, like her Jewishness, is the fruit of both nature and nurture. Piercy has dedicated this collection of long-out-of-print and never-before-published works to the women of the vibrant Grrrl movement--a feisty form of feminist expression found in zines and music and on the Web--because Piercy had been Grrrl long before Grrrl got its name. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Piercy's 15th collection of poetry starts in the mid-1970s and works backwards, beginning with excerpts from out-of-print works and ending with juvenilia and a section of previously uncollected work written over the last quarter-century. The "nudge" ("Song of the Nudge") is a familiar presence here, for this writer likes to fly in the face of restraint, decorum, and subtlety. When asked to have patience, she replies, in "Ask Me for Anything Else," "I am empty with wanting,/ not like a box/ but like a tiger's belly." Her poems acknowledge two types of readers: one presumably male, who while loving, opposes and resists her ravenous appetites; the other female, the women "retelling/ agonies like amber worry beads." In her introduction, Piercy claims to be a source of inspiration to young writers she admiresthe "grrrls" of web-based feminismand she even has her own web page. This selection may not include her strongest work, but will be important to those who follow her closely.Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
