A Woman Under the Surface Poems and Prose Poems [Paperback]

FromA Woman Under the Surface:
MOON AND EARTH

Alicia Ostriker
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Of one substance, of one
Matter, they have cruelly
Broken apart. They never will touch

Each other again. The shining
Lovelier and younger
Turns away, a pitiful girl.

She is completely naked
And it hurts. The larger
Motherly one, breathlessly luminous

Emerald, and blue, and white
Traveling mists, suffers
Birth and death, birth

and death, and the shock
Of internal heat killed by external cold.
They are dancing through that blackness.

They press as if
To come closer.

Ostriker's poems illuminate the places where myth and daily life converge. . . . [She] writes with much intelligence, in a language characterized by the clarity of its images and the precision of its rhythms. Cool, cerebral, studied. Passionate, visceral, immediate. Can the same poet write both kinds of poems? . . . Alicia Ostriker is not only writing both kinds of poems-she also is fashioning poems that are cold and fiery at the same time.