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4 Poetry Collections Every Lesbian Should Read

If you appreciate poetry, here are four noteworthy collections that should absolutely be on your bookshelf. This list includes Mary Oliver’s Evidence; Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn; Marilyn Hacker’s Desesperanto, and British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture.

Evidence by Mary Oliver (Beacon)

Mary Oliver’s new collection of poetry, Evidence, includes forty-six poems that show why this prolific writer is so beloved and respected.

Evidence is Oliver’s nineteenth book of poetry and though the poems pick up on her familiar themes of nature, spirituality, love and humanity, she continues to offer a fresh perspective and to encourage readers to “behold/ the reliability and the finery and the teachings/ of this gritty earth gift.” Oliver may be an optimist, but she is not a blind optimist.

She recognizes the beauty in the world alongside humanity’s inability to maintain or care for it. She understands the heart’s music (“My heart, that used to pump along so pleasantly”), but also knows that there are times when a “wild man” can take over the orchestra and wreak havoc.

Evidence begins with an epigraph by Kierkegaard, “We create ourselves by our choices,” and, indeed, many of the poems in the collection focus on the choice of perception – how we chose to see and absorb, love and disregard, the world and those around us.

In the poem, “Li Po and the Moon,” Oliver examines this struggle on several different levels:

There is the story of the old Chinese poet: at night in his boat he went drinking and dreaming and singing

then drowned as he reached for the moon’s reflection. Well, probably each of us, at some time, has been as desperate.

Not the moon, though.

Many of the poems in Evidence also focus on the moments or transitions in life where our perspective begins to change. In “Halleluiah,” Oliver explains that “Everyone should be born into this world happy/ and loving everything./ But in truth it rarely works that way.” She admits that she has spent her life “clamoring” for happiness, and then the poem poses several questions to the reader:
And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes almost forgetting how wondrous the world is and how miraculously kind some people can be?
Oliver is known for her depictions of animals and her ability to use them to reflect larger question of spirituality. In “Almost a Conversation,” she imagines talking to an otter and examines their slow process of learning how to trust and understand each other through body language:
He has no words, still what he tells about his life is clear. He does not own a computer. He imagines the river will last forever. He does not envy the dry house I live in. He does not wonder who or what it is that I worship. He wonders, morning after morning, that the river is so cold and fresh and alive, and still I don’t jump in.
Evidence is a beautiful book filled with poems that force the reader to slow down, reflect, and, yes, even see the world through a more generous and appreciative lens.

The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde (Norton)

Audre Lorde is a renowned feminist, lesbian and activist – all roles and elements of identity that she brings into her ten collections of poetry and five volumes of prose. The Black Unicorn, published in 1978, highlights her voice as one that challenges preconceived notions of gender, sexuality and race. The title poem, “The Black Unicorn,” immediately introduces several of the collection’s themes and captures Lorde’s use of symbolism to construct meaning:

The black unicorn is restless the black unicorn is unrelenting the black unicorn is not free.
Several of the poems in the collection focus on race – the dynamics and politics within the African American community, blatant and oblique forms of racism and their impact, race as a factor of identity, and the cultural and ancestral implications of race.

In “A Woman Speaks,” Lorde focuses on the perspective of an African American woman who is almost forced to introduce or explain herself and her role in society by both what she is and what she is not:

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.
Though many of the poems here do capture the unique and wide ranging perspective of African American women, several also explore the struggles and triumphs of African American men.

“Eulogy for Alvin Frost” begins with the startling line, “Black men bleeding to death inside themselves,” and then moves to address Frost’s surviving son:

Please cry whenever it hurts remember to laugh even when you do battle stay away from coffee and fried plastic even when it looks like chicken and grow up black and strong and beautiful but not too soon.

We need you and there are so few left.

Lorde also leaves room for love and several of the poems here focus on her intimacy with women. In “Recreation,” she writes about the discovery of love through poetry and the body:
My body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me.

Touching you I catch midnight as moon fires set in my throat I love you flesh into blossom I made you and take you made into me.

The Black Unicorn is a tremendous and powerful collection of poetry and a reliable introduction to this powerful, inspiring and important mind.

Marilyn Hacker’s Desesperanto (Norton)

Moving out of the country and into the city, Marilyn Hacker’s Desesperanto captures the grit and magic of New York City and Paris the way Oliver uses nature and animals. Though Hacker has been called a “radical formalist,” don’t let that scare you off if sonnets and ghazals are not your thing: her voice is as contemporary and urban as her themes.

The title of Hacker’s collection combines the Spanish word esperanto, for hope, with the French word desespoir, for “to lose heart.” Many of the poems play off this combination and what it means to have hope in another person, a city, or an ideal, and then what it means to lose that sense of promise. Desesperanto is divided into three sections – Vendanges, Itinerants, and Desesperanto – and begins with a preface poem, “Elegy for a Solider,” dedicated to the late poet June Jordan, where Hacker remembers the New York City that the women once shared. The poem moves from “The city where I knew you was swift” to “The city where I knew you is gone,” and refers to the aftereffects of September Eleventh:

We have a Republican mayor. Threats keep citizens in line: anthrax; suicide attacks. A scar festers where towers once were; Dissent festers unexpressed.
In another poem, “Embittered Elegy,” Hacker writes about Matthew Shepard and Dr. Barnett Slepian, who was murdered by an anti-abortion activist. In “Elegy for a Soldier,” Hacker uses the city to mourn the loss of her friend, but here she centers on the classroom and the frustrations of teaching perspective and, even more challenging, empathy:
Sheltered by womanhood and middle age from their opinionated ignorance since I’m their teacher, since they’re my students, I try to wedge bars of their local cage open…But what they’re freed to voice is rage against every adjacent difference.
The middle section of the book, “Itinerants,” features twenty sonnets that capture the city of Paris – the sounds, smells, tastes and colors. In “On the Stairway,” Hacker describes her seventy-year old neighbor, Mme Uyttebroeck, who “wears champagne-froth lace sheaths above her knees/…like a striptease/ artiste who’s forgotten whom she needs to please.”

The book’s third section, titled after the book, plays off many of the themes from the previous two sections, including: grief (“grief walks miles beside the polluted river”); Hacker’s two beloved cities (“December fog condensed above the Seine,” “The Hudson saw my heart break”); and, of course, love (“She took what wasn’t hers to take: desire”).

This is a rich collection of poetry and highly recommended. Also check out Hacker’s other books, particularly Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (Arbor House) and Going Back to the River (Vintage Books), which received a Lambda Literary Award.

Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy (Picador)

Carol Ann Duffy was recently appointed Britain’s first female poet laureate, but that’s not the only reason to check out this extremely engaging and thought-provoking poet. A wide audience appreciates Duffy’s direct voice and accessibility, and her seventh collection, Rapture, is particularly powerful.

Rapture, which won the 2005 T.S. Eliot Prize, is a book-length love poem featuring fifty-two individual poems or sections that explore the many transformations of love. The first poem, “You,” begins as an introduction to the book: “Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head.” This opening poem brings up several themes and concepts that are repeated throughout the rest of the book, including the use of repetition itself – “I went to bed, dreaming hard, hard, woke with your name.” The poem describes the experience of falling in love as a “glamorous hell.”

Duffy continues with the idea that love is a certain hell, but shows that it is also strong enough to raise the dead, as she reveals in “If I Was Dead”:

I swear your love would raise me out of my grave, in my flesh and blood,

like Lazarus; hungry for this and this, and this, your living kiss.

Throughout the book, Duffy moves deftly through a variety of references, from cell phones to Shakespeare. In the poem “Text,” she writes about the literal and metaphoric struggle to communicate in a series of couplets:
I reread your first, your second, your third,

look for your small xx, feeling absurd.

One of the more interesting approaches Duffy uses to plumb this dense but inexhaustible subject is the power of memory. In one of the collection’s most beautiful and complex poems, “Forest,” she writes about how she followed her lover “into the sighing, restless trees and my life vanished.”

The poem continues to describe the two as they “swooned” and “kissed, kissed,” but then, there is a moment of doubt:

Didn’t we? And didn’t I see you rise again and go deeper into the woods and follow you still, till even my childhood shrank to a glow-worm of light where those flowers darkened and closed.
The speaker later ends the chase with a plea: “I am there now, lost in the forest, dwarfed by the giant trees. Find me.”

Even the language of love is worth exploring. In “Syntax,” Duffy writes one exceptionally precise line that captures both love and the book: “Love’s language starts, stops, starts;/ the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.”

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