Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme
- Book Review,
by Marge Piercy
Amazon.com
The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, by Marge Piercy, is that rare book of self-avowedly religious poetry whose devotional purpose actually enhances its poetic strength. Piercy's poems, organized in chapters with thematic headings like "Family," "Marriage," and "Prayer," are plainly presented as help for living. Readers will turn to poems such as "Putting the Good Things Away" when they need inspiration for understanding their self-sacrificing mothers. Yet Piercy's devotions are real poems with a literary integrity whose strength and beauty are free of sentimentality. They are also like liturgy, because they make room for readers to experience new aspects of contemporary life while simultaneously offering the security of very old frameworks for perceiving life. The Jewish themes of these poems are sometimes overt (as in "Chuppah"), but they are often more subtle (as in "The Art of Blessing the Day"). Throughout, they evince the careful balance of faithful attention to worldly life and the humble consideration of cosmic order that distinguishes Judaism among Western religions. "Attention is love," Piercy writes in the title poem, "what we must give / children, mothers, fathers, pets, / our friends, the news, the woes of others. / What we want to change we curse and then / pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can / with eyes and hands and tongue. If you / can't bless it, get ready to make it new." --Michael Joseph Gross
From Library Journal
We tend to think of writers according to categoriesAnovelist, poet, essayistAand find it hard to imagine a writer who excels in more than one medium. But Piercy has written many wonderful novels (e.g., Braided Lives, LJ 1/82; Vida, LJ 1/80) and an equal number of deeply moving and exquisitely crafted books of poetry (e.g., What Are Big Girls Made Of? LJ 2/1/97). Her newest volume of poetry is in many ways the best yet. It brings together poems written to celebrate Piercy's Jewishness, reflecting and expressing the joy, pain, passion, and elegance of this rich culture. Her poems overflow with family, ritual, tradition, history, and food. In the amazing "The Ark of Consequence," Piercy plays with the meanings of "ark" and "arc," calling us to recognize the interconnectedness of all that we do and are and understand that our actions have consequences: "What we shoot up into orbit falls/ to earth one night through the roof." A group of Shabbat poems and a section on seder foods fervently capture the intensity and flavor of the Jewish tradition. Highly recommended for all libraries.AJudy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"An exquisite book...Strong, passionate and poignant. Marge Piercy's words make a moving variety of experience beautifully and forcefully real."
--Lyn Lifshin
"Keep her volume near your home altar; Marge Piercy will give wings to your heart's stirrings."
--Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi
"If poetry, as Auden said, exists to praise, then surely it exists to bless. And Marge Piercy teaches us the art of blessing in her poems, with the firmness of her eye, the courage of her strength, the directness of her language, as gritty and sweet and real as the fruits she carries with her on all her journeys through family memory and tradition, prayer and the holy days of sacred year, gathering her wisdom and the wisdom of her difficult Jewish tribe, and bringing that wisdom home."
--Rodger Kamenetz, author of Terra Infirma, The Missing Jew : New and Selected Poems,and The Jew in the Lotus
"Whether I find myself guffawing over 'Eat fruit' or falling shattered by "At the well' or being attuned to the Breath of Life by 'Nishmat,' it is my life--my whole life--that I am finding, renewed and enlivened by these poems. We can shmooze these poems, pray these poems, Torah-study these poems. What we breath out, Piercy has breathed in; what Piercy breaths out, we can breath in. We and she breath each other into life."
--Rabbi Arthur Waskow
"Marge Piercy's superb spiritual powers are up to their elbows in the lived world, bringing a liberated and grounded wisdom to everything they touch. Behind this book one hears the great embracing toast of Jewish tradition: 'L'Chaim!' -- 'to life!' In its pages the work of the heart and the work of the spirit are visibly, passionately advanced."
--Jane Hirschfield
"Accessible, transformative, thrilling. Marge Piercy teases out the spiritual lights hidden within the most ordinary events. Here is poetry so reverent and disturbing that it borders on liturgy."
--Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
From the Hardcover edition.
Review
"An exquisite book...Strong, passionate and poignant. Marge Piercy's words make a moving variety of experience beautifully and forcefully real."
--Lyn Lifshin
"Keep her volume near your home altar; Marge Piercy will give wings to your heart's stirrings."
--Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi
"If poetry, as Auden said, exists to praise, then surely it exists to bless. And Marge Piercy teaches us the art of blessing in her poems, with the firmness of her eye, the courage of her strength, the directness of her language, as gritty and sweet and real as the fruits she carries with her on all her journeys through family memory and tradition, prayer and the holy days of sacred year, gathering her wisdom and the wisdom of her difficult Jewish tribe, and bringing that wisdom home."
--Rodger Kamenetz, author of Terra Infirma, The Missing Jew : New and Selected Poems,and The Jew in the Lotus
"Whether I find myself guffawing over 'Eat fruit' or falling shattered by "At the well' or being attuned to the Breath of Life by 'Nishmat,' it is my life--my whole life--that I am finding, renewed and enlivened by these poems. We can shmooze these poems, pray these poems, Torah-study these poems. What we breath out, Piercy has breathed in; what Piercy breaths out, we can breath in. We and she breath each other into life."
--Rabbi Arthur Waskow
"Marge Piercy's superb spiritual powers are up to their elbows in the lived world, bringing a liberated and grounded wisdom to everything they touch. Behind this book one hears the great embracing toast of Jewish tradition: 'L'Chaim!' -- 'to life!' In its pages the work of the heart and the work of the spirit are visibly, passionately advanced."
--Jane Hirschfield
"Accessible, transformative, thrilling. Marge Piercy teases out the spiritual lights hidden within the most ordinary events. Here is poetry so reverent and disturbing that it borders on liturgy."
--Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
From the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
Winner of the 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize
About Marge Piercy's collection of her old and new poems that celebrate the Jewish experience, the poet Lyn Lifshin writes: "The Art of Blessing the Day is an exquisite book. The whole collection is strong, passionate, and poignant, but the mother and daughter poems, fierce and emotional, with their intense ambivalence, pain and joy, themes of separation and reconnecting, are among the very strongest about that difficult relationship.
"These striking, original, beautifully sensuous poems do just that. Ordinary moments--a sunset, a walk, a private religious ritual--are so alive in poems like 'Shabbat moment' and 'Rosh Hodesh.' In the same way that she celebrates ordinary moments, small things become charged with memories and feelings: paper snowflakes, buttons, one bird, a bottle-cap flower made from a ginger ale top and crystal beads.
"She celebrates the body in rollicking, gusto-filled poems like 'Belly good' and 'The chuppah,' where 'our bodies open their portals wide.' So much that is richly sensuous: 'hands that caressed you, . . . untied the knot of pleasure and loosened your flesh till it fluttered,' and lush praise for 'life in our spines, our throats, our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues.'
"I love the humor in poems like 'Eat fruit,' the nostalgia and joy in 'The rabbi's granddaughter and the Christmas tree,' the fresh, beautiful images of nature--'In winter . . .the sun hangs its wizened rosehip in the oaks.'
"I admire Piercy's sense of the past alive in the present, in personal and social history. The poems are memorials, like the yahrtzeit candle in a glass. 'We lose and we go on losing,' but the poems are never far from harsh joy, the joy that is 'the wine of life.'
"Growing up haunted by Holocaust ghosts is an echo throughout the book, and some of the strongest poems are about the Holocaust, poems that become the voices of those who had no voice: 'What you carry in your blood is us, the books we did not write, music we could not make, a world gone from gristle to smoke, only as real now as words can make it.'
"Marge Piercy's words make such a moving variety of experiences beautifully and forcefully real."
From the Publisher
"An exquisite book...Strong, passionate and poignant. Marge Piercy's words make a moving variety of experience beautifully and forcefully real."
--Lyn Lifshin"Keep her volume near your home altar; Marge Piercy will give wings to your heart's stirrings."
--Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi"If poetry, as Auden said, exists to praise, then surely it exists to bless. And Marge Piercy teaches us the art of blessing in her poems, with the firmness of her eye, the courage of her strength, the directness of her language, as gritty and sweet and real as the fruits she carries with her on all her journeys through family memory and tradition, prayer and the holy days of sacred year, gathering her wisdom and the wisdom of her difficult Jewish tribe, and bringing that wisdom home."
--Rodger Kamenetz, author of Terra Infirma, The Missing Jew : New and Selected Poems,and The Jew in the Lotus"Whether I find myself guffawing over 'Eat fruit' or falling shattered by "At the well' or being attuned to the Breath of Life by 'Nishmat,' it is my life--my whole life--that I am finding, renewed and enlivened by these poems. We can shmooze these poems, pray these poems, Torah-study these poems. What we breath out, Piercy has breathed in; what Piercy breaths out, we can breath in. We and she breath each other into life."
--Rabbi Arthur Waskow"Marge Piercy's superb spiritual powers are up to their elbows in the lived world, bringing a liberated and grounded wisdom to everything they touch. Behind this book one hears the great embracing toast of Jewish tradition: 'L'Chaim!' -- 'to life!' In its pages the work of the heart and the work of the spirit are visibly, passionately advanced."
--Jane Hirschfield"Accessible, transformative, thrilling. Marge Piercy teases out the spiritual lights hidden within the most ordinary events. Here is poetry so reverent and disturbing that it borders on liturgy."
--Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
From the Inside Flap
Winner of the 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize
About Marge Piercy's collection of her old and new poems that celebrate the Jewish experience, the poet Lyn Lifshin writes: "The Art of Blessing the Day is an exquisite book. The whole collection is strong, passionate, and poignant, but the mother and daughter poems, fierce and emotional, with their intense ambivalence, pain and joy, themes of separation and reconnecting, are among the very strongest about that difficult relationship.
"These striking, original, beautifully sensuous poems do just that. Ordinary moments--a sunset, a walk, a private religious ritual--are so alive in poems like 'Shabbat moment' and 'Rosh Hodesh.' In the same way that she celebrates ordinary moments, small things become charged with memories and feelings: paper snowflakes, buttons, one bird, a bottle-cap flower made from a ginger ale top and crystal beads.
"She celebrates the body in rollicking, gusto-filled poems like 'Belly good' and 'The chuppah,' where 'our bodies open their portals wide.' So much that is richly sensuous: 'hands that caressed you, . . . untied the knot of pleasure and loosened your flesh till it fluttered,' and lush praise for 'life in our spines, our throats, our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues.'
"I love the humor in poems like 'Eat fruit,' the nostalgia and joy in 'The rabbi's granddaughter and the Christmas tree,' the fresh, beautiful images of nature--'In winter . . .the sun hangs its wizened rosehip in the oaks.'
"I admire Piercy's sense of the past alive in the present, in personal and social history. The poems are memorials, like the yahrtzeit candle in a glass. 'We lose and we go on losing,' but the poems are never far from harsh joy, the joy that is 'the wine of life.'
"Growing up haunted by Holocaust ghosts is an echo throughout the book, and some of the strongest poems are about the Holocaust, poems that become the voices of those who had no voice: 'What you carry in your blood is us, the books we did not write, music we could not make, a world gone from gristle to smoke, only as real now as words can make it.'
"Marge Piercy's words make such a moving variety of experiences beautifully and forcefully real."
About the Author
The Art of Blessing the Day is Marge Piercy's fifteenth volume of poetry. Others include What Are Big Girls Made Of?; The Moon Is Always Female; her selected poems, Circles on the Water; My Mother's Body; Available Light; and, new from Leapfrog Press, Early Grrrl, her out-of-print and previously uncollected early poems. In 1990 her poetry won the Golden Rose, the oldest poetry award in the country. She has also written fourteen novels, all still in print, including Woman on the Edge of Time; Vida; Gone to Soldiers; He, She and It (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award); The Longings of Women; City of Darkness, City of Light; and, most recently, Storm Tide, with her husband, Ira Wood. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into sixteen languages.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"Growing Up Haunted"
When I enter through the hatch of
memory those claustrophobic chambers,
my adolescence in the booming fifties of
General Eisenhower, General Foods and
General Motors, I see our dreams:
obsolescent mannequins in Dior frocks
armored, prefabricated bodies; and I see
our nightmares, powerful as a wine red
sky and wall of fire.
Fear was the underside of every leaf
we turned, the knowledge that our
cousins, our other selves, had been
starved and butchered to ghosts.
The question every smoggy morning
presented like a covered dish:
why are you living and all those
mirror selves, sisters, gone
into smoke like stolen cigarettes?
I remember my grandmother's cry
when she learned the death of all she
remembered, girls she bathed with,
young men with whom she shyly
flirted, wooden shul where
her father rocked and prayed,
red haired aunt plucking the
balalaika, world of sun and snow
turned to shadows on a yellow page.
Assume no future you may not have
to fight for, to die for, muttered
ghosts gathered on the foot
of my bed each night. What you
carry in your blood is us,
the books we did not write,
music we could not make, a world
gone from gristle to smoke, only
as real now as words can make it.
Buy from Amazon
Compare Prices
|
|
Home
