Thankless, mundane, and “never done,” housework continues to be seen as women's work, and contemporary women poets are still writing the domestic experience sometimes resenting its futility and lack of social rewards, sometimes celebrating its sensory delights and immediate gratification, sometimes cherishing the undeniable link it provides to their mothers and grandmothers. In Sweeping Beauty, a number of these poets illustrate how housekeeping's repetitive motions can free the imagination and release the housekeeper's muse. For many, housekeeping provides the key to a state of mind approaching meditation, a state of mind also conducive to making poems. The more than eighty contributors to Sweeping Beauty embrace this state and confirm that women are pioneers and inventors as well as life-givers and nurturers. “My fingers are forks, my tongue is a rose . . . / I turn silver spoons into rabbit stew / make quinces my thorny upholstery . . . / how else could the side of beef walk / with the sea urchin roe?” sings the cook in Natasha Sajé's ode to kitchen alchemy. “I love the notion that we can take our most poisonous angers, our most despairing or humiliated or stalemated moments, and make something good of them--something tensile and enduring,” says Leslie Ullman. Whether we are fully present in our tasks or “gone in the motion” of performing them, whether our stovetops are home to “stewpots of discontent” or grandmother's favorite jam, something is always cooking.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Gemin's book embraces women's 'domesticity,' owns it, and stresses its transformative power. Sweeping Beauty explores the role of women in the home place, how they've found both confinement and comfort there, how they've learned from and departed from the lives of their female ancestors who have swept so many floors, baked so much bread, and hung so much wash on the line. The book celebrates 'women's work' and highlights its connection to myths and fables of cultures throughout the world.”--Mary Swander, author of The Desert Pilgrim: En Route to Mysticism and Miracles
“The poems in Sweeping Beauty are like prequels to an archaeological dig--real voices recording the nature of our lives before the crockery is buried in lava, before the house is tumbled by quake or quiet centuries. The poets in this collection often mix themes of writing with their images of house-work, acknowledging poetry's recognition of our most basic needs and our efforts to resist them, our longing for order and chaos both, our endless fascination with how our lives can be stirred, swept, polished, and then undone all over again. What a treasure--to find these poems which take as their source our daily lives, and discover there profound insight, energy, transformation.”--Betsy Sholl
“The poems in Sweeping Beauty are like prequels to an archaeological dig--real voices recording the nature of our lives before the crockery is buried in lava, before the house is tumbled by quake or quiet centuries. The poets in this collection often mix themes of writing with their images of house-work, acknowledging poetry's recognition of our most basic needs and our efforts to resist them, our longing for order and chaos both, our endless fascination with how our lives can be stirred, swept, polished, and then undone all over again. What a treasure--to find these poems which take as their source our daily lives, and discover there profound insight, energy, transformation.”--Betsy Sholl
About the Author
Pamela Gemin is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Her poetry collection Vendettas, Charms, and Prayers was a Minnesota Voices Project winner from New Rivers Press. She is editor and co-editor, respectively, of the poetry anthologies Are You Experienced? (Iowa 2003) and Boomer Girls (Iowa 1999).
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a beauty of an anthology,
This review is from: Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework (Paperback)
Pamela Gemin has gathered together an impressive group of women poets and an astonishing collection of poems. As its subtitle indicates, the collection is a thematic one, focusing on women's work. Rather than being a limitation, this focus allows Gemin to cover a wide range of topics: cooking, cleaning, childbirth, child rearing, putting up preserves, putting up with hard times, making romance, making mischief, writing poetry, and, of course, sweeping. We find poems about grandmothers, mothers, wives, and daughters, and yes, fathers, sons, and husbands. We find poems that take a historical perspective, others set in the here and now, and still others that look forward. We find poems set in all the places where women do their work: the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, cellar, closet, porch, and garden. This collection is not any kind of feminist diatribe or a circling of the wagons but rather a celebration of women and the work they do. Democratically and fortuitously arranged in alphabetical order, the collection begins with Elizabeth Alexander's direction-setting "The female seer will burn upon this pyre" and ends with Carolyne Wright's exquisite "Prayer":
Prayer Bless my life-its inks and paperweights and houseplants fringed with sun. Give me the quiet, Lord, I close my eyes and turn my tongue back for. Don't feed me too much, and when I can't decide between love and what's jammed in the typewriter or roughed out on the drawing board, take away the coins I flip and make me listen: That young man smiling in my kitchen at me is in love. With me. That's one door in my house that opens on more than grief or dirty sheets or the supermarket twice a week. It gives on light, and I, your moth, am beating to get in. Give us this day, and with no promises but what we are-two small people trying to be one-send us out and say, "That's fine. Light fills your gaps. Breathe on."
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
complicated,
By
This review is from: Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework (Paperback)
I enjoyed this work, and I think many women who grew up with mothers who had a love-hate relationship with housework would as well. Rather than considering this a work about "whining," I took seriously the idea that housework is something that is expected of women (when a house dirty, most often the woman of the house is seen as responsible). Housework is also something that never ends--the same tasks are done day after day, week after week. Yet housework also makes people feel they can bring a sense of order and pride into their lives, so it can be therapeutic as well. Perhaps there are no male-authored poems because men don't have the omnipresent cultural connection to (seen any commercials for cleaning products lately?)and responsibility for housework. Regardless, the book is a great exploration of the many connections women have to the home and their families.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fear of feminism? Not this reader,
This review is from: Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework (Paperback)
I certainly do consider this a feminist anthology and plan to use it in a Feminist Theories course I'll be teaching this spring. Its publication is a triumph and a minor miracle in this antifeminist year of 2005: many thanks to Pamela Gemin for accomplishing it. What is documented in this astounding collection of intelligent, articulate, beautifully crafted poems by women is the amazing range and depth of the effects of housework on female lives and consciousness. Resentment of servitude, yes, absolutely. You will find it here, though I would not cheapen it with a word like "diatribe." Resignation is here; joy is here; pride is here; history is here, as women poets make it clear that they cook and sew and clean as their mothers did, and their mothers were harmed by servitude but also possessed a tradition of expertise and knowledge they passed down to their daughters. This is ambivalence and complication; this is humanity at its best. The great lesson of this remarkable collection is that you can limit a population of humans to tasks characterized as menial and kept that way by tradition and politics, exploited; but give those humans a pen and they will prove they never stopped thinking about everything their work, and their lives, meant. Menial work does not destroy art: it only postpones or hides it. And the hand of the artist will make art from whatever is within reach. If the housework doesn't do it satisfyingly enough--and the poems in this collection document both possibility and impossibility there--the poetry about the housework surely will.
Anyone who values fine art, and justice, and is moved by the proof of humanity and its indestructible will to forge beauty from whatever is at hand, has to admire and love this book.
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