"BODY. FEMALE BODY IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE" "BODY. THE FEMALE BODY IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY IN ENGLISH, THE VOICES OF THE MOON PUBLISHING POETRY, SASSO MARCONI (BO), 2009.
Volume edited by Loredana Magazzeni, Fiorenza Morman, Brenda Porster, Anna Maria Robustelli.
In these terrible years of cultural regression and general disengagement, which is even denied women the space they so painstakingly, sometimes at the cost of their own blood, had won (remember in Rome, Georgiana Masi, among many others, the thousands of women, the millions in the world during the seventies and eighties of the hypothesized and then betrayed the Revolution), the more worthwhile the work of the editors of this volume, which have stronger antologizzato entries of the major British and American poets. The forgetting that, as fierce and relentless brand, seems to have imprinted on the flesh of our cruel age, is suddenly removed from the celebration of this song is hidden, known only to those in more acculturated, the tireless readers who, like the editors and translators of 'anthology, have kept alive the light of inculturation in the darkness that engulfs us and makes us almost blind.
The volume consists of seven sections, each dedicated to a theme critical of women's lives: "Metaphors and myths revisited", "Images of self-love and disaffection," "Desire", "Births and surroundings", "Aging and disease," "Violence and separations," "The critical eye: clarifications, resentment, posters, for a total of sixty poems, with English text in the face. It is a poetic manifesto against the cancellation of the body, now more than ever denied, violated, nullified every day, we know from the crime, a woman is murdered by the person closest to her, a husband, a companion, a lover, a lover, a father, a brother.
You go then, in the first section, from the poem "Thoughts Ruskin" by Elma Mitchell, in which women are seen as infinitely far from the stereotypical male, which was made of "lilies and roses", which reveals that mixed of desire and not to hold the fragrance freesia, as in "Marigold" by Vicky Feaver (singular that the name "Marigold" in English is "Marigold" that is the same as a famous brand of rubber gloves for household chores ... ), that at which celebrates what for centuries has been the subject of the utmost shame and reproach, menstruation, in the poetry of Lucille Clifton and Sharon Olds, here is the celebration fluids of the female body hidden for millennia to / from the same women, unmentionable taboo. Or again: it enhances the Great Mother Eve, "the first scientist," died of thirst for knowledge, that is, desecrating the known fairy tale, the little ambivalent Cinderella by two mothers. Then, in the second section, we find the poems that glorify the most intimate parts of the unspeakable and the female body, even removed from the words of women and especially the writings of men, or relegated to pornographic sites, in boudoirs, lavatories, basements, in the blind alley, in trouble, that is, those who deny it, as in "Anorexia" Alice Jones, who is nothing but the cruel response ("I canceled until they disappear, to die") to the question of the cruel world, "Woman, why you exist?" Or "Bulimia" by Denise Duhamel, on the contrary, denounced the attempt by the woman hungry for everything " "fast world" to swallow what feels monstrously missed.
We then move on to the section entitled "Desire", which stresses how the desire of women to be relegated to the back room of the mind, body, words unspoken, words are not written for self-censorship, prohibition, reticence, shame. The male body in the poems becomes absolute distance or are complementary with that of the total female sex, and when his drives become a verb and it sings the pride when it comes to same sex, love, always denied, or hard won, a woman and a woman in the poems, among others, to Dorianne Laux, Carol Anne Duffy, Adrienne Rich.
And again in "Births and around" the singing of the most extreme adventure of all existence, birth, in turn magnified, and retorizzata desublimated abyss of horror and ecstasy sublime, or the relationship that most ineffable woman can live, what with his son, or with the unborn, the daughter never had, so in the next section, "Aging and Disease" the decay of the body of a woman, made for love, denounces his removal, "the breast less" in the poetry of Marlyn Hacker, or "Mastectomy" in that Alicia Ostriker, who has dedicated several poems to the disease. We then move on to "violence and separation," where the rapes in their most atrocious forms come alive in ways almost bleeding Marge Piercy, Agneta Falk, Mary Dorcey and others. Finally, the "gaze critical caveats, resentment, posters, where the daring of poets minutes relaxing in songs unmatched, high-impact ironic, as in" Sonnet of the vagina "by Joan Larkin, or the notorious" Warning " Jenny Joseph, the true flag of feminists from around the world, which gave rise to "Red Hat Society, which has thousands of followers everywhere, even in China, but not in Italy, to close with an invitation" for women strong "by Marge Piercy, valid for all those women who believe they can not raise with the strength of their arms, the entire universe, but which nevertheless is always required. Volume
not to be missed, it should not be lacking in any library of a woman. And not only.
(NOTE CRITIQUE OF FRANCESCA FLOUR)
