BOOKS
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mountain stream?" Will the poet "be a citizen / or an afterthought of the
state?" It is sad enough that these questions still have to be asked.
It
would
be worse, as the poet remarks, to pretend that they are all past, so that he
could "curse / from the picket lines of my verse / the concept ofApartheid."
But that these remain questions, that they haven't already been answered in
the negative, that despite the poet's recognition that evil does not end late or
soon he nevertheless goes on to imagine how the stars and stripes must heal
the stripes and scars, is the sign of a sensibility actively engaged with a his–
tory which, for better or for worse, is far from over.
It
is this sense that history is not over which links the two sections of
the book, for both are the work of a sensibility which even as it searches for
clarity recognizes that stories of praise and blame, of betrayal and reconcilia–
tion, of hope and anger, rarely do justice by themselves to actual human
states of affairs. The maturity of this book, and its humanity also, is its
understanding that, clear as we may be about the facts, their meaning re–
mains in the final analysis provisional, something which only our future acts
can determine.
JOHN BURT
DOMESTIC MYSTICISM
A HUNGER. By Lucie Brock.Broido. Alfred A. Knopf. $8.95. THE
GOOD THIEF. By Marie Howe. Persea Books. $9.95.
In the dialogue between the body and the soul the body has, of
late, had all the argument on its side. This is particularly true among women
poets, for many of whom sexual identity or "gender" (when it includes its
psychosocial aura) has seemed most relevant. Of course, "woman" has be–
come so indeterminate a category in contemporary cant that any aspect of
identity may be subsumed under it. One chaiJenge for contemporary women
poets is to decide just how far they wish "womanhood" to define the terms of
their awareness.
It
is a good sign, I think, that "the soul" has returned with a
fresh, contemporary aura, not genderless but metagendered.
The metaphysical impulse arising in, altered and constrained by history
and biology runs through many of our best women poets-Dickinson, Moore,
Plath, Bishop, Graham. It is particularly strong in two recent first books, Lu-
