Women's Voices For Change

By the end of the poem the speaker wholly identifies with Thor, capable of destruction as well as creation and blessing, and the poem ends in a place of tremendous raw power and confidence with her joyfully striking the flat glowing disc of her “own sun.” What a wonderful affirmation of the act of creativity!

I was hooked by "Yuletide," then drawn in by the breathless, energetic style offering a fresh take on an old story of love, loss, and redemption.

Christina Rossetti was devoted to deep Christian conviction and a rich artistic sensibility. Both influences can be seen in this poem’s spare, even stark diction that seems to belie the intensity of its imagery and underlying religious themes.

We each see, hear, sense what we think we’re saying or hearing; but often that connection to another is lost. And silence looms in the air.

The larger question driving the poems of "Approaching Ice," which examines the lives of many historic polar explorers, was to figure out just this: why they went. Why, knowing the difficulties, did they go?

The poem is more broadly about the struggle of the speaker to separate from her mother and be born as an individual, and of course, about the same conflict confronted by all mothers and daughters throughout time.

The poem’s opening introduces a wonderful pun—the word “seems.” It’s a kind of doubling that characterizes the poem as a whole, and through it we come to see sewing a seam as a metaphor for something larger—the domestic life, the life relegated to women as a whole in the nineteenth century.

I find today’s poems marvelously lyrical and experiential—phrases like “sweet deviant chant,” “less the nuance,” and “suave hours” give sharp delight in their sound and sense.