Amazon.com: The Muse Strikes Back: A Poetic Response by Women to Men: Katherine McAlpine, Gail White: Books

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The Muse Strikes Back is a mainstream feminist poetry anthology, derivative by thematic design, in that the included poems all answer, respond to or parody poems by men. Therein lies its complicating and not uninteresting problem. For example A.E. Stalling's poem "Whoso List to Hunt," parodies Sir Thomas Wyatt's poem of the same title and Mary Holtby's "To Donne Rhyming" echoes John Donne's "The Sun Rising." So a reader must know (or go to the trouble to locate elsewhere, as none of the original poems responded to are printed in The Muse Strikes Back) the founding work to fully appreciate the anthology's inclusions. That's a sizable literary expectation given that the book covers a good hundred poets ranging from biblical literature and classical traditions, through the centuries and literary periods to the contemporary scene. The editors claim to have discovered "a venerable and ongoing tradition of spirited female backtalk," but this reviewer is less than convinced. A disproportionate several dozen of the anthology's poems are written by a handful of contributing poets with few prepublication acknowledgments. Their presence weakens the editors' claim of a venerable tradition. However The Muse Strikes Back has its delights. A number are period-piece Brit-Lit parodies - Mary Holtby's tweaks of Leigh Hunt and Shelley are especially funny, goofy bits of doggerel. Enid Dame's biblical restatements -"Noah's Daughter," "Esther," and others - are poems of beautiful language and shifting perspective. Laurel Speer's takes on Rilke, Shelley and Blake read fresh and smart. Barbara Harr's parody of Robert Bly ("Blue toads are dying all over Minnesota/ ...It is also good to be poor, and live in the hen house....") is good-natured and obvious, while Marilyn Hacker's reverie on James Wright is fraught with the deep voice of autobiographical torture, love and despair-a worthy response to her Ohio brother "...fifty-two when you died of cancer/ of the tongue, apologist of the lonely/ girls who were happened to near some bleak water." Other strong inclusions and interesting curiosities and occasional pieces include Anne Sexton's poem to her friend W.D. Snodgrass on his winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 and Erica Jong's teasingly jaunty "The Perfect Poet." But many of the anthology's inclusions respond to what's familiar by imitative versifying-without sufficiently fresh vision, poetry's clean cut, rearrangement and absorbing depth. Overall unevenness buries some seriously funny as well as serious poems. Identifying cadences and rote parallels trap June Owens' "Promises: On a Familiar Poem by Robert Frost": "What vows you made, I don't pretend to know,/ Or how the snow seemed to your horse...." and Erica-Lynn Gambino's "This Is Just to Say/ I have just/ asked you to/ get out of my/ apartment...." Such examples indicate the difficulties selecting fresh material for a project as respondent-based as this one. Regardless of its shortcomings, Women's Studies programs and library poetry collections will find The Muse Strikes Back of interest for reading and reference.

The Muse Strikes Back: A Poetic Response by Women to Men (Paperback)

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