THE LITTLE SPACE: POEMS SELECTED AND NEW, 1968-1988.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
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Finalist for the national Book Award and the Lenore Marshall
Prize of the Academy of American Poets. Listed among Best Books of 1998 by
Charles Guenther, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "A major new collection by
one of America's most gifted and sensitive poets."
In this selection of poems from thirty years of a distinguished writing career, we see the growth of a poet's mind, heart, and spirit as Ostriker struggles to love "This wounded/ World that we cannot heal, that is our bride." Whether she probes the meaning of childhood, family, marriage and motherhood, or art, history, politics, and God; whether she is celebrating sexuality or confronting mortality, the poet includes "whatever I can grasp of human experience within my art--the good and beautiful, the evil and chaotic. I tell my students that they must write what they are afraid to write; and I attempt to do that myself." |
The title of this deeply moving collection is from a Blake epigram, "For we
are put on earth a little space/ That we may learn to bear the beams of
love." For Ostriker too, love and feeling must be endured and false comfort
stripped, but this impulse remains at odds with the sheltering responsibilities
of a poet as mother and teacher. Such enveloping contrasts--"The kernel of
death/ life wraps itself around/ Like chamois cloth Around a diamond/ Ice/ Cold
at the center"--are here made simultaneously funny and tragic, intense and
conversational.
--Publisher's Weekly
"Now that Ginsberg is gone, Ostriker is contemporary poetry's most Blakean
figure...in love with a wounded world, she wants us to heal it with the force of
human imagination, compassion, and love....A wonderful book." --Diana Hume
George, Women's Review of Books
Ostriker weaves the strands of feminist rage, post-Holocaust theology,
historical ambivalence and spiritual longing into something more: a savagely
reflexive, profoundly moving vision.
--Jay Ladin, Parnassus
Hers is a voice that boils over with the will to feel, to know, and to sing. The
Little Space will entice many readers to the poems in her seven previous voumes.
--Doris Earnshaw, World Literature Today
Two things have always struck me most about Alicia Ostriker's writing, the
terrific intimacy she establishes with the reader, a combination, I guess, of
humor and vividness, and the fierceness of her mind, that splits things to the
marrow, the pith of their nutritive human significance.
--Richard Silberg, Poetry Flash
Ostriker has an amazing knack for describing those bewildering moments when our
assumptions crash to pieces against actual experience...The Little Space
provides an excellent introduction to the work of America's most fiercely honest
poet.
--Joel Brouwer, The Progressive
Many writers have followed in Ostriker's wake, but she was the pioneer....
Ostriker's poetry in The Little Space also ranges widely through the great
topics addressed by many poets, but always with her signature edginess,
lyricism, iconoclasm and startling vision.
--Libby Scheier, The Toronto Star
Table of Contents
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Poem selections: pp 220-21, 229