Julie Fay believes, as she writes in one of her poems, that "we are nothing but what we imagine / ourselves to be." In these pages, she has imagined personalities from many parts of the world and the mind. They include characters from Greek and Native American myth as well as from history - Andromeda and Cassiopeia, Georgia O'Keefe and a Hungarian countess, the poet's own mother and sisters - in settings that range from the Grand Canyon to the Grand Canal. Fay examines the lives of women at various stages of life - as daughter, sister, lover, mother - while she journeys into both the self and into history.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
"Much has happened since you left./ The world is dull and people/ cut their hair again/ I don't like the woman I've become." Working a very well-mined vein of domestic doings, ancestral antecedents and generational pathos, Fay nonetheless often manages to convince in this second collection of verse narratives and "love poem[s] to our family,/ such as it is." Fears that a husband's love will consume the poet and their coming child; a mother's death "in the room where you gave birth to me"; a myth-laden femininity (She darts to/ the circle's center. The heart. The drums.") and the jottings of an American alone and abroad are all familiar, and familiarly rendered. (And there are unbearable stretches: "You tossed all night/ like a wave/ that doesn't know how/ or where to go.") Yet Fay's sometimes erotically charged lyricism and stoic looks at life have an immediacy that often feels like real conflict. We are left with the sense that small comforts and home-front victories don't come easily here, that the poet has had to work toward ease with herself and her responsibilities: "The baby we call Jaws/ is asleep. You lay him down/ and his triangle mouth/ makes you think/ one more day,/ I can handle one more."
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 Kirkus Reviews
paper 0-8229-5682-9 The second book by an East Carolina Univ. professor (Portraits of Women, 1991) continues in the monotones of her last and embodies the same tough-talking feminist point of view. In autobiographical narratives, Fay makes clear shes traveled through/years, countries, and lovers hoping to be not ordinary. Her meandering verse certainly supports these facts, if not her aspiration. In Tritogeneia: Recurrent Dream, the poet channels the goddess Athena and beds an anonymous lover for a one-night stand in Greece; similarly, in Il etait une fois, she, after abandonment by one lover in France, quickly picks up another; she boasts of a perfect, gentle lover in Christmas Card from Vence, France, and copulates in the waters offshore from Sicily in Sicilian Sestets at Etna. Not merely a European sex tour, Fays poems also travel abroad: she mocks the bicentennial of Bastille Day in Paris; she goes Christmas shopping in Venice; and she swims naked with her elderly mother at the French seaside. A number of moving poems eulogize this mother, who died shortly after the European trek: following the funeral back home, the poet sleeps in her mothers bed; later sees her mother in a peasant woman abroad (Santorini Daughter); and thinks of her, eight months after, while studying near the French-Spanish border (Prisms). Rougher verses recall the poets days of hard drugs and groovy times. Trite idioms and imagery (dressed to beat the band, a rush of silent violins, etc.) further detract from poems already inattentive to sound and form. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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