In Marge Piercy's The Moon Is Always Female … interests in epistemology are reduced to interests in female and male consciousness. For Piercy, poetry becomes a masking or "lateral sliding" continually threatened by a "woman inside" and a lover's demands. Love presumably is a mutual wanting wherein both parties fight each other for their fulfillments, each wrestling to open the other up ("Arriving"). Individual poems, however, are likely to stress only the woman's role and anguish. "Excursions, incursions," for instance, describes a series of female/male encounters in which women are unwilling objects of sex fantasies, unwanted intruders into male domains, and betrayers of their mothers' dreams. Like its opposition of art and science, the poem is unsympathetic to male needs, programmatic, and conventional. Indeed, one gathers from these poems that, much as girls dress dolls, situations are continually adorned and readorned with apparel stamped not from Barbie patterns but from liberation cant. What Piercy wants ultimately is woman's choice—not only in goals and roles but also in childbearing. As a propagandist for these views, she may be excused for being polemical, two-dimensional, and sloganish, and the exaggerated oppositions and repetitions of the syntax may be seen as stemming more from oratorical technique than lyrical form. Her poetry is best when she is opposing either her lover ("A battle of wills disguised," "Season of hard wind," "Apologies") or her mother ("My mother's novel," "Crescent moon like a canoe"), but one never senses that, as Stein claimed for poets, she has "ever felt anything in words." The poems are earned; the rhythms flat, more a result of workshops than of ear; and the words appear chosen for accuracy rather than joy. (pp. 457-58)
Jerome Mazzaro, "At the Start of the Eighties," in The Hudson Review (copyright © 1980 by the Hudson Review, Inc.; reprinted by permission), Vol. XXXIII, No. 3, Autumn, 1980, pp. 455-68.∗
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