Pamela White Hadas has now selected the best of her published work and combined it with poems never before collected. Self-Evidence contains legendary, mythic, historical, and imaginary characters - Lilith, Pocahontas, Simone Weil, the wives of Watergate, a circus performer, and others. With playful originality and virtuoso voicing, Hadas weaves tapestries of women's loves and labors. Perhaps uniquely in our time, she contrasts a spareness of autobiographical detail with an unusual intimacy of tone. Hadas's literary inventiveness is far-ranging, entertaining, and eclectic - an artistic accomplishment Howard Nemerov called "odd, quirky, humorous and exact."
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The title suggests a confessional impulse, but Hadas works through a series of masks that conceal the self as much as they reveal itAshowing "a woman dressed in myth," as the poet describes designer Coco Chanel. Varied and ventriloquial, her dramatis personae inhabit women on the edge of disappearance: Eurydice, Watergate wives struggling against public view, Simone Weil starving herself, Pocahontas dying of consumption in a strange new world. The effect of this layering of guises is bewildering, and the poems often seem impacted with historical or allusive detail. But Hadas always directs them to moments where masks can be discarded and truth revealed. As Hadas's Rahel Varnhagen, a Romantic-era intellectual who hosted a Berlin salon and served as a military attach?, observes, "a person can look outside history, past/ the dreams, the lies, the theories." (Extensive notes lighten the reader's historical load.) Often brought to life in staged readings, Hadas's wry speakers are at their best when their shifting bounds of selfhood find lyric expression, and ironic shading. Her Circe, a "travel agent," talks back "Because your men are making pigs of themselves,/ that's why. And for fun." Lines from "Psyche's Suite," a long poem, go even further: "How describe, looking back, this moment, her life?/ A 'miracle'? 'challenge'? 'a pretty fix'?/ 'hanging by a thread'? 'a power dive'?/ Will Psyche brag how she stole this trophy from the Styx?"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
From Library Journal
Hadas has been makingAand remakingAthis book for 20 years; about a quarter of the material is new and a quarter of it substantially revised. Beginning with Sarah and ending with Psyche, she uses a surprising variety of voices and characterizations to pull off a tour-de-force exploration of women in history.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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