The Land of Milk and Honey (James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

Sarah Getty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1996 | Series: James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series

Sarah Getty's poems represent the work of the New Woman, as the nineteenth century called her, now middle-aged, with daughters, private lives, and weathered marriages-but no male figure steps forward in any overshadowing role. Meditating on her own experience of girlhood, marriage, and the mothering of a daughter, Getty combines a feminist sensibility with a profound sense of connection to the natural and mythic realms from which the forces of generation emerge. Her poems, centered in domestic suburbia, range outward through those ancient realms and backward through the history of her family's women. Getty is concerned to explore the losses and absences of the spirit as rehearsed by the flesh, its old enemy and friend. In doing so she reveals a startling sense of humor, which is another way of saying that she has come to terms with reality. These poems-lively, thoughtful, autonomous-reflect her response to that reality.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her debut collection (a selection of the James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series, edited by Richard Howard), Getty explores women's lives with deft intelligence and no sentimentality. "That Woman" is a graceful tribute to generational continuation: "Even now, your daughter/ doesn't see you at her elbow as she walks/ the beach. There! a gull dips to the Pacific,/ and she points and says to the baby, 'Look!'" Many poems display an ironic, affectionate wit, as in "Pocket Guide," addressed to a daughter: "it's all I issued you, gear/ for your stay here...." Getty illuminates the treacherous ballet of mother-daughter relationships in many guises. "A Winter's Tale" recasts the myth of Demeter and Persephone: "Unknowing, my Mother makes/ the earth a place like this-for we are very much/ alike, I must admit...." Getty handily twists the story of Sleeping Beauty in "On Her Fifteenth Birthday," in which the speaker, Beauty's mother, is princess, grandmother and wicked fairy all at once: "All those stories are hers now;/ my work is done, and she's undoing it, wrapping up/ her girlhood strand by strand... Dreaming." In the title poem, a glittering synthesis of the entire collection, Dorothy of Oz clicks her heels in and out of an 1823 prairie town that spawned three generations of women who are joined for a moment in modern-day California as "The Only Child leans back/ into my arms and I lean/ back in my mother's, home again. Rocking,/ we watch the west for omens unfolding in the gold."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

After A Quarrel: The Juilliard String Quartet
Also, In Winter
Channel 2: Horowitz Playing Mozart
Ciphers
Cleaning The Storm Windows
Corn
Crows, Whales
Deer, 6:00 A.m.
Getting Clearer
The Land Of Milk And Honey: 1. Bedford, Massachusetts, Sept
The Land Of Milk And Honey: 2. Mt. Carroll, Illinois. April,
The Land Of Milk And Honey: 3. Hollywood, Illinois. July,
The Land Of Milk And Honey: 4. Hollywood, Illinois, May,
The Land Of Milk And Honey: 5. Carlsbad, California, Februar
Lost
The Mooncalf
Mother, May I?
Music Cruise
On Her Fifteenth Birthday
The Oseberg Ship
Peresphone To Hades, In Bed
Pocket Guide
Presbyopia
Sit. Anx. Reg. Fert.
Thanksgiving
That Woman
Troupers
The Wash
A Winter's Tale
You Have Been Given --
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Hardcover: 89 pages
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press; First edition. edition (November 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1570031584
• ISBN-13: 978-1570031588
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,770,211 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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