WRITERS' CHOICE
EDITORS' NOTE: Writers' Choice
is a new department ofshort comments
on oldas well as new books that our contn'butors like particularly andwant to
call attention to .
SARA BLACKBURN
Jose Lezama Lima,
Parad~so .
(Farrar, Straus.) Translated from the Spanish by
Gregory Rabassa-beautiful, maddening sensual, formidable , reading it is
like getting an injection of the life it magnifies.
Fay Weldon ,
Female Fn·ends.
(St. Martin's.) The funny and shattering novel
about the lives of three 1920's-born women, by the neglected English author
of
Down Among the Women.
Flann O'Brien ,
The PoorMouth .
(Viking .) A vicious , hilarious take-off on the
Irish. Not as funny as
At Swim-Two Birds
or
The Hard LIfe
(his previous
novels), but hideously funny nevertheless for people who haven't read him
before .
ADRIENNE RICH
Maps
&
Windows ,
by Jane Cooper. (Macmillan.) A collection from thirty
years ' work: earlier unpublished poems and newer ones, bridged by an
autobiographical essay. "Nothing Has Been Used in the Manufacture of This
Poetry That Could Have Been Used in the Manufacture of Bread" is an
exploration of a woman poet's relationship to her work , by a poet of fifty
whose integrity shapes every line she writes.
Ordinary Things ,
byJean Valentine. (Farrar, Straus.) " I am the razor that has
been put away ,
alsol
the wrist in the photograph" . .. In this poem , and
others in her third collection ,Jean Valentine compresses and implodes images
of survival , of a woman 's life finding its level among the realities of children,
violence , lovers , work , dreams . Valentine's work more than that of any
contemporary poet reminds me , in its psychological intensity , of Emily
Dickinson . A paperback edition is due in October.
