FROM A SOFT ANGLE: Poems About Women

by Carol Berge ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 8, 1971

These initially soft, subtle protests against the unfairness that has more to do with what the world makes of their differences (""Libra/Scorpio Poem"") than with the attribution of blame to either sex, gains strength as the resonances of the earlier poems become increasingly present in those placed later in the volume. The poems are about women, but as the section ""Women as Half the World"" reveals, it is women primarily in relation to men, sometimes to themselves, in an ultimately smothering obsession to create structures against ever-threatening aloneness (""This groove, this/ lonely need to mate, to rut or/ move with one's own kind. . .""). What remains beyond this is a superb sense of rhythm ("". . . to trust the line, the breath, as it issues/ naturally, the words as they utter themselves from/ the whole or ravaged flesh""), in which line breaks divide lines of almost democratically equal length, connecting disparate thoughts in the same smooth way our minds do.

Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Bobbs-Merrill

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION