Available Light (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

The “available light” of these poems is Piercy’s metaphor for the feeling and perception that come with maturity. She plays on the words: The power that is available is strong but rationed: the light is clear but limited. Her recognition of the limitations of insight gives her work a patina of honesty, the right coloring for her gutsy, earthy, and always compassionate verse.

Piercy is at her best in celebrations of sensuous and sensual experience. The natural and the erotic fuse effortlessly. There is no holding back, and at the same time there is no straining toward exotic or grotesque effect. Piercy achieves something like the sexual sublime: “I am devoid of fantasies clean as rainwater/ waiting to flow all over your skin.”

To balance this openness (an early title among her books of poetry is LIVING IN THE OPEN), Piercy reminds the reader of the armor necessarily worn by those who cannot afford to live a life open to possibility. A girl of the slums is etched in sensuous imagery that turns on itself with an anger meant to scratch out the reader’s eyes: a hungry tiger crouching belly low to begin a sensuous creep toward fresh food.

In the last section of this collection, “The Ram’s Horn,” Piercy transcends erotic joy and social criticism with religious vision. These are poems that build on Judaism’s capacity to celebrate holiness in the very act of honoring life. Piercy’s religious fervor enables her to remain the honest singer of life as her poetry reaches out to accomplish spiritual transformation: “Let . . . the lesser appetites and the whining of/ the ego cease.” Everything is finally aligned “into a new pattern.”

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXIV, April 1, 1988, p. 1306.

Library Journal. CXIII, March 15, 1988, p. 60.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIII, February 5, 1988, p. 81.

San Francisco Chronicle. June 5, 1988, p. REV5.

Women's Review of Books. V, July, 1988, p. 7.