Customer Reviews

Six Lips

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Throughout much of history, women were to be, as they put it in the sixteenth century, "chaste, silent, and obedient." Women were controlled in two ways: their mouths and their vaginas. The poems in the aptly and provocatively titled Six Lips celebrate the overturning of these strictures. This is a book of poems by a poet rooted in life, one that is both spiritual and sensual, one that arises from where the two are opposites and where the two are one.

In 1968 Muriel Rukeyser wrote "The Poem as Mask," in which she declared that for her, as a woman poet, there would be "no more masks, no more mythologies"; she would speak as herself, and "for the first time, . . . the fragments join," she wrote, "in me with their own music." These are poems Rukeyser would admire; these are poems about a woman's experience of the world through her body. As such, when one opens, lives from, and venerates the body, one morphs into spirituality. This is a book about seeing the world of being in this world of form; in "Behind the Waterfall I Become Invisible Again": Schott writes that it is "as if I have seen Being / become Is."

Sometimes the poems are reminiscent of Plath, especially "Sacrament of the Moths," but she, fortunate to have been born in a later generation, swims the dark waters of Plath as if it were the English Channel and arrives triumphant on the other side.

Some lines resonate for me: "In my time," said the old lady, / the moon was redder, and men more beautiful" and "Or maybe it happens only in your final illness / as you convalesce from being alive."

This is a true poet, one speaking from wholeness.