SOURCE: “The Renewal of the Self By Returning to the Elements,” in Ways of Knowing: Essays on Marge Piercy, edited by Sue Walker and Eugenie Hamner, 1991, pp. 73-89.

In the following essay, Nelson considers the theme of healing in Piercy's verse.

Marge Piercy speaks of poetry as “utterance that heals on two levels.” First, it heals the psyche because “it can fuse for the moment all the different kinds of knowing in its saying.” Second, it can heal “as a communal activity. It can make us share briefly the community of feeling and hoping that we want to be. It can create a rite in which we experience each other with respect and draw energy” (“Mirror Images” 189-90). Healing is a timely metaphor. In World in Collapse, John Killinger describes “a universal situation in which man is buffeted, upended, and generally perplexed by a world not of his...