The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998 (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Alicia Suskin Ostriker (Author)

Book Description

Series: Pitt Poetry Series | Publication Date: November 10, 1998

In this selection of poems from thirty years of a distinguished writing career, we see the growth of a poet's mind, heart, and spirit as Ostriker struggles to love "this wounded / World that we cannot heal, that is our bride." Whether she probes the meaning of childhood, family, marriage, and motherhood, or art, history, politics, and God; whether she is celebrating sexuality or confronting mortality, the poet includes "whatever I can grasp of human experience within my art - the good and beautiful, the evil and chaotic. I tell my students that they must write what they are afraid to write; and I attempt to do so myself."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Like one of those trees with a major limb lopped, / I'm a shade more sublime today than yesterday," Alicia Ostriker writes in "Normal," one of several fine mastectomy poems collected in The Little Space. A poet of consummate physicality, Ostriker wraps her philosophical inquiries in the fleshly guise of poems about marriage, illness, and above all motherhood--that "continuous egg through time," as she calls it. In "Surviving," for instance, Ostriker mourns expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died at the height of her artistic powers, shortly after giving birth. From Modersohn-Becker, she moves to her own mother's oft-repeated disappointments, and then to a single, shattering truth: "What woman doesn't die in childbirth / What child doesn't murder the mother."

What is our responsibility to these thwarted women, these "broken mothers," our forebears? Don't we owe them more than just grief? For Ostriker, the answer lies in poetry itself. Faced with suffering or atrocity ("The Boys, the Broomhandle, the Retarded Girl"), she concentrates on making us see. "Art destroys silence," she imagines Shostakovich writing in "The Eighth and Thirteenth," then hears "the words never again / Clashing against the words / Again and again / --That music." Therein lies Ostriker's mission: to depict evil and at the same time speak against it. Like the speaker of "Normal," these wry, clear-eyed poems are cheerful in the face of affliction, unflinching in their need to bear witness. --Chloe Byrne

From Publishers Weekly

The title of this deeply moving collection is from a Blake epigram, "For we are put on earth a little space/ That we may learn to bear the beams of love." For Ostriker, too, love and feeling must be endured and false comfort stripped, but this impulse remains at odds with the sheltering responsibilities of a poet as mother and teacher. (Ostriker is a Rutgers English professor.) Such enveloping contrasts?"The kernel of death/ Life wraps itself around/ Like chamois cloth/ Around a diamond// Ice/ Cold at the center"?are here made simultaneously funny and tragic, intense and conversational, politically charged and personally graphic. Ostriker writes textured, metaphorical descriptions of everything from the Holocaust, Monet, sex education guru Alan Gutmacher, and gym showers: the erotic imagination is "a flock of puffy doves/ ...White contours begging caressing thumbs,/ the thready/ Magenta entrails." Throughout her career, Ostriker has deftly employed rhythm and meter in such a way as to take a decidedly ambiguous stance toward tradition and continuity (for a son: "you were those things/ I saw! and I have seen./ I shall be singing this/ when all the forests you have burned are green"). Though sometimes failing to make her lines move seamlessly between personal and political trauma ("So from now on you are responsible./ That is what we mean when we say/ consciouness is a curse"), Ostriker, with a rare intelligence, works to do justice to both. (Nov.) FYI: The Little Space has been nominated for a National Book Award.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (November 10, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822956802
• ISBN-13: 978-0822956808
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,126,257 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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