[Shapiro is an American educator, poet, novelist, and critic who has served as editor of the New York Times Book Review. In the following excerpt, he provides a favorable assessment of Half-Lives, commenting on Jong's treatment of women's issues.]

To write as a woman is to write from an extreme situation: the assumption behind Erica Jong's and Adrienne Rich's recent poetry. It gives energy to their lines. And I suspect, it gives them readers they might not ordinarily have. This can be a temptation (I think it is for Erica Jong) to play to that audience. But for the most part it must mean poet touching reader, reader touching poet, in a way that can make both more alive.

Erica Jong is quick, easy, raunchy (the pose is sometimes that of a female rake) and her personality so fills her poems [in Half-Lives] that it's difficult sometimes to see around her to her meaning. There is nothing particularly feminist or ideological in this; it's part of the personality packaging some poets fall into naturally these days. It permits the reader easy access to a book through knowing the basic plot and the main character (as, for example, Diane Wakoski: men throw me off their motorbikes).

Her free verse is held together by repetitions (a line, or phrase or syntactical unit) and it is designed to move quickly, images shifting with each line, the imagination always looking for the next turn. Given that technique, you don't stay with a line; there isn't time for that savoring of something made to last that has been one of the traditional pleasures of poetry. But then this poetry is designed to say that art isn't a refuge, that nothing lasts, that all a poet can do is to make lines out of her life to prove that life real, and when the lines stop the life has gone. (See her opening poem: "Why does life need evidence of life? / We disbelieve it / even as we live.")

Does she manipulate her audience? Maybe some of her poems use women's liberation as a piece of pop culture (to know the movement lives, take a walk down the bra-less streets of New York), as in her funny "Seventeen Warnings in Search of a Feminist Poem." "Beware of the man who writes flowery love letters; he is preparing for years of silence. / Beware of the man who praises liberated women; he is planning to quit his job." Some of these cartoon poems reverse Thurber's war of the sexes. The opening of her "Anniversary" poem, for example:

        Every night for five years
        he chewed on her
        until her fingers were red and ragged
        until blue veins hung out of her legs
        until the children tumbled
        like baby kangaroos
        out of raw crimson pouches
        in her stomach

Now it may be that in every marriage there's a victor and a victim, but is the wife always the victim (and doesn't the battle sometimes shift rapidly, to say nothing of long periods of armistice)? But wife as victim is the program. (It takes her next poem, "Divorce," to reverse that.)

In general, men don't fare too well in these poems. "How You Get Born": "you wait in a heavy rainsoaked cloud / for your father's thunderbolt…. / Your mother lies in the living room dreaming your eyes. / She awakens and a shudder shakes her teeth…. / She slides into bed beside that gray-faced man, / your father." That's the way it used to be. In her own experience, love is better; "You on the prow / of Columbus' ship / kissing the lip / of the new world." Emily Dickinson, you've come a long way. The manner is playful throughout but the material frequently is not. Beneath it all is her assertion in poem after poem, of the essential hard luck of being a woman poet. That's the way I read her "Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit" ("She must never go out of the house / unless veiled in paint. / She must wear tight shoes / so she always remembers her bondage."), which is like a verse rendition of the psychologist Matina Horner's thesis that women are conditioned by the culture to fail. And her purest Muse poem, "Why I Died," is a celebration of a suicidal woman ("She is the woman I follow. / Whenever I enter a room / she has been there—") with its inevitable recall of Sylvia Plath.

Harvey Shapiro, "Two Sisters in Poetry," in The New York Times, August 25, 1973, p. 21.