[In the following review, Taylor provides positive assessment of What Are Big Girls Made Of?.]

Marge Piercy is a versatile poet with broad interests, and What Are Big Girls Made Of?—her thirteenth collection—invokes several public and private issues that have long haunted or angered her. Opening with seven intimate “Brother-Less Poems,” Piercy draws us inside a “family snapshot” in which she hugs “the two pillars” of her “cracked world”: her “cold father” and her “hot brother,” the latter also described as “the dark pulsating sun of ＼her］ childhood, / the man whose eyes could give water / instead of ice.” Graphic evocations of this half-brother （who has recently died） follow, beginning with flashbacks to the end of the Second World War, when he returns stateside, “still a Marine, crazy on experimental / drugs for malaria.” Piercy delves further into their common past, recalling their coming-of-age within a family that resembles “a pit lined with fur and barbed wire; / roast chicken and plastique, warmth / and bile, a kiss and a razor in the ribs.”

Later, as the half-brother passes from divorces and real-estate speculations through troubled relationships with his estranged stepchildren （and an inability to communicate with his half-sister）, a fragmentary portrait emerges of a tormented man in whom collide the desperate impulses of his innermost will and the violent outside forces of history. This theme in fact characterizes the entire collection. “We both felt the world as a great pain,” remarks Piercy, “… and we each / set out to change it: our separate ways.” Yet after formulating this insight, the poet must admit, in the final poem, that she lacks a real hold on the man whom her half-brother became. “It is hard // to say goodbye to nothing / personal,” she concludes, “mouthfuls bitten off / of silence and wet ashes.” While constructing his portrait, Piercy has likewise sought to deconstruct his myth （in her eyes）; and her words trouble us because, as she herself confesses, she fails in both endeavors. Yet in her failing are disclosed truths. It is paradoxically the poet's inability to define her half-brother and the exact borders of their relationship—whence the interpretative openness of these verses—that is sincere and moving.

Her half-brother's “self” is half-authentic—“built of forged documents, / stories lifted from magazines, / charm, sweat and subterfuge”—and Piercy's postulate （here and elsewhere） is that these chaotic intersections of the public and the private constitute what all “big girls” （and boys） are made of. From a number of vantage points, she tries to perceive how these perilous, if inevitable, crossroads arise in our bodies and minds. After dissecting her family background （tenderness for her parents manifests itself in later poems, although even soft feelings can be offset by bluntness）, she draws back—in the second section—from her own self's preoccupations. Engaging poems on current topics ensue, the most memorable of which narrates in unadorned sextains the everyday routines of an abortion-clinic receptionist. The woman's day begins at four a.m. with a telephone call: “Of course she does not / pick up, but listens / through the answering machine / to the male voice promising / she will burn in hell.”

Other committed poems poke fun at administrators, describe looming mortgages （in the form of birds “with heavy hunched shoulders / nesting in shredded hundred dollar bills”）, and bring out the banal gruesomeness of a talk show in which the speaker's voice “roars … / like a freight from a tunnel,” every car carrying “the same / coke load of fury.” Piercy also takes a stand on a woman's right to “choose” （“to be pregnant / … childless / … lesbian / … to have two lovers or none”） and satirizes men's views of sexual harassment.

These feminist poems may stir listeners who hear them read aloud （“Stand up now and say No More. / Stand up now and say We will not / be ruled by crazies and killers”）, yet their language resembles that of rallying cries. It is a language confident in its power to designate and deplore, which is to say that Piercy no longer pushes language, haltingly, to its fragile, uncertain limits so as to more genuinely interrogate, speculate on, and explore the equally uncertain frontiers of the perceptible and imaginable worlds with which she challenges herself. These engaging verses are unsubtle when compared to the half-brother sequence, the evocative erotic poems （in the section entitled “Salt in the Afternoon”）, and especially the metaphysically rich nature poems collected in “A Precarious Balance.”

This latter group reveals Piercy to be a precise, sensitive observer, a quality that disappears whenever her diction waxes ideological. Poems here describe a blizzard, several different does, morning moths, and, most originally, grackles whose “cries are no more melodious / than the screech of unadjusted / brakes, and yet I like their song / of the unoiled door hinge creaking, / the rusty saw grating, the squawk / of an air mattress stomped on.” Two arresting poems depict the same early-morning car accident when “a doctor with Georgia plates / ＼comes］ roaring over the hill far too fast” and kills one of two young deer darting across the road. Piercy, who has witnessed the accident, must close her hands over the windpipe of the dying deer in order to put it out of its suffering. Elsewhere, meditating on garter snakes, the poet observes that “we see everything except that swift / archaic beauty brushing over the earth.” Yet Piercy has indeed grasped this beauty, and her nature writing consistently seeks such aeon-spanning glimpses, yearns for a cosmic wholeness, and—thereby rejoining her political concerns—suggests that our fundamental duty is to care. This responsibility is well summed-up in her last lines, from a long-poem entitled “The art of blessing the day”:

What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hand and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.