[In the following excerpt, Finch examines the “attitude” expressed in Green Age.]

These three books of poetry [Baptism of Desire by Louise Erdrich, Green Age by Alicia Ostriker, and Toluca Street by Maxine Scates], written by three women coming from very different places as poets at the beginning of the end of our century, make a revealing cross-section. Louise Erdrich, a successful novelist who has written only one other book of poems, presumably uses poetry to write in ways not possible with the novel form. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, well-established as a poet, uses this volume to continue ideas developed in six other books of poems and three books of poetry criticism. Maxine Scates is new to the poetry scene; this first book of poems is published as the winner of an annual national poetry competition. …

If Erdrich arrives at ordinariness with relief after her book's wild journey, neither Ostriker nor Scates ever left it far behind to begin with. In spite of repeated small epiphanies and flights, both of their books rest firmly in the physically obvious world. Perhaps the maple tree in Green Age's second poem “A Young Woman, A Tree,” is the best figure for the kind of movement that Ostriker explores:

The secret leafless system
That digs in dark
Its thick intelligent arms
And stubborn hands
Under the shops, the streets,
The subways, the granite,
The sewage pipes'
Cold slime,
As deep as that

The world Ostriker presents is a sobering one, as real as that “cold slime”; her habitual act is one of disenchantment. Her poems derive much of their tension (and, hence, rhetorical power) from this often shocking act of disillusioning. In the suite of daughter poems, for instance, a family cat seems to be thinking of “German prison camps [and] South American torturers,” while the daughter herself is compared to “an apple nobody wanted / or was ever going to want” (“Bitterness”). In poems with more public themes, such as “A Meditation in Seven Days,” the harshness is often not even the result of metaphor, but instead appears as unqualified fact:

In filth, three timid children prod him
While screwing their faces up from the stink
That emanates from his mouth—
He has beaten them black and blue …

Ostriker's process of disenchantment works best in this book when the graveness of her vision is lightened and complicated by a riveting, wry black humor. Frustrated with a depressed friend who says she hates the world, the speaker concludes:

Do you know, to hate the world
Makes you my enemy?
I love the world, I reply
Sticking the knife in.
I'm trying to help, I mutter
Twisting it.

In passages like this, the daring candor illuminates the world more brightly because the speaker has turned it first on herself. In “Windshield,” one of the most successful poems in the book, the speaker responds with an awesome and furious humor to the murder of a friend by urban would-be windshield cleaners:

Up at the red light now, they are doing their crisp dance
With their rags and squeegees
Around a helpless Subaru.
Watch it, mister—
A warrior strut …

… Ostriker communicates an attitude. …