[In the following essay, Walker provides a survey of Piercy's literary career and the central themes and feminist perspective of her poetry and fiction.]

Although Marge Piercy—poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist—describes herself as a political writer and a feminist, her works move beyond the causes she supports to incorporate an overall thematic interest in the struggle between freedom and oppression. Most of her creative energies are devoted to fiction and poetry, and she writes both with amazing productivity—a novel published one year, a book of poems the next. Her first publication was a book of poems entitled Breaking Camp （1968）; Going Down Fast, her first published novel appeared in 1969, though she had written six other novels prior to its publication and feels that her difficulty in breaking into print stemmed from the fact that her work was too political and too feminist for publication in the 1950's and 1960's.

Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Robert and Bert Bunnin Piercy. She has one half-brother thirteen years her senior, the son from her mother's former marriage. Her father worked for Westinghouse and repaired machinery; her mother, named Bert because Piercy's grandfather wanted a boy instead of a girl, was the oldest daughter of nine children. It was she who had to help raise the younger siblings, the four girls and five boys who survived childhood. Forced to leave school before finishing the tenth grade, Bert grew up in poverty, but later taught Marge to observe closely, value curiosity, and to love books. This legacy became a major theme in Piercy's work, as Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt （1982） attests:

My mother taught me to observe. A woman who had not been allowed to finish the tenth grade, she had some extraordinary ideas about how to raise very young children. … She had contempt for people who did not observe, who did not notice, and would require me to remember the houses we passed going to the store, or play mental hide-and-seek in other people's houses that we had visited. We would give each other three random words to make stories around. We would try to guess the stories of people we saw on the bus and would argue to prove or disprove each other's theories.

A writer's childhood, Piercy believes, often stimulates the muse. “You learn to sink roots into your childhood and feed on it,” she says, “twist it, wring it, use it again and again. Sometimes one daub of childhood mud can set a whole poem right or save a character.” And it is childhood, growing up within a typical patriarchal working-class family in inner-city Detroit that Piercy describes with Proustian fidelity in Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt. Blacks and whites fought; husbands cheated on and beat their wives, drug abuse, drunkenness, rape, and child-molestation were common. Little tolerance was given to Jews, and yet, in the midst of ugliness and violence, Piercy finds beauty in her own backyard. She writes of a garden rampant with tomatoes, beans, lettuce, onions, and Swiss chard. She notes the pansies, iris, mock oranges, wisteria, hollyhocks along the alley fence, the black-eyed susans and the goldenglow, its stems red with spider mites. “Nothing,” Piercy writes, “will ever be more beautiful than the flowers in that yard, except my mother when I was young.”

Two things illumine this reflection. First, Piercy's method of observation and commentary. She dredges the ugly for social utterance and never spares the ways it limits and destroys human growth and development. Yet simultaneously she sees beauty that thrives in the midst of and in spite of oppression, violence, internal and external disruptions: Second, the role of the mother is a major theme that occurs throughout her work. In My Mother's Body （1985）, written after her mother's death, an entire section is devoted to elucidating the mother-daughter relationship. It is one fraught with ambivalence, with love and with the less tolerated feelings of hate. “A woman must reconcile herself to her mother and to the mother within her, if she is not to become her,” Piercy remarked in a discussion of her poem “Crescent moon like a canoe,” a poem that appeared in the 1980 volume of The Moon Is Always Female. It deals with how the poet and her mother “fought like snakes, biting / hard at each other's spine to snap free,” and in an angry accusation directed to her mother, she rails that “You burned my paper armor, rifled my diaries, / sniffed my panties looking for smudge of sex, / so I took off and never came back.” Leaving home, however, was more geographical than psychological, and the poet reflects:

My muse, your voice on the phone wavers with tears.
The life you gave me burns its acetylene
of buried anger, unused talents, rotted wishes,
the compost of discontent, flaring into words
strong for other women under your waning moon.

My Mother's Body reiterates the old concerns, but it seems that death has brought a reconciliation and buried the long years of ambivalence that were often voiced in earlier poetry and prose. The final poem of the section “What Remains” addresses the mother's body, and asks:

What is it we turn from, what is it we fear?
Did I truly think you could put me back inside?
Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten
furnace and be recast, that I would become you?
…
This body is your body, ashes now
and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts,
my throat, my thighs. You run in me
a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood,
you sing in my mind like wine. What you
did not dare in your life you dare in mine.

It is from this core that individuation occurs, that a woman moves beyond the concerns of the mother to the self and to other human relationships, to the significance of sex, to political concerns, to the world beyond the confines of family and geographical location.

An overview of Piercy's work chronologically gives the reader insight into sociological interests and recurring psychological themes. Piercy's first published book, significantly entitled Breaking Camp, is a compilation of the best of her early poems. It lacks the cohesion, the synthesis, of her later work but establishes the pattern of political concern that will reoccur in later poetry and fiction.

Going Down Fast, a first novel written from 1965-1967, followed the publication of Breaking Camp. It shows the least women's consciousness of any Piercy novel and reflects her Chicago experience. Concern with the ruthlessness of urban renewal, police brutality, and university politics made it difficult for a woman to establish herself as a writer. Going Down Fast features a male rather than a female protagonist. Piercy explains that at the time of the book's publication in 1969, feminist concerns were not popular. Editors would return manuscript after manuscript with comments such as “I don't believe in these people,” and “I don't want to read about people like these.” Serious fiction about being a woman was hard to place, and the five novels written prior to Going Down Fast were rejected because of their stance, it seems, not because of any lack of quality.

In Hard Loving, also published in 1969, political themes merge with female consciousness and with the difficulty of forging relationships. The poems were written at a time when Piercy was involved in SDS activities, with the antiwar movement, and with living in a matrix of four relationships that united her political and personal concerns. Walking slowly into love rather than falling in love marks the initial sequence of six poems. It is followed by “The death of the small commune” which marks the disintegration of SDS and what Piercy feels to be one of the best schools of political organizers that existed in twentieth-century America. “What we wanted to build,” she says in the title poem, “was a way station for journeying to a new world, / but we could not agree,” and nothing remains “but a hole in everything.” The poems in Hard Loving, represent a “learning experience,” a time when the author was teaching at the Gary extension of Indiana University. A boy sits in her classroom “in boredom thick and greasy as vegetable shortening,” and Piercy has come out on the train from Chicago to talk / about dangling participles.” The poet says “I am supposed / to teach him to think a little on demand,” but:

The boy yawns and does not want to be in the classroom in Gary
where the furnaces that consumed his father seethe rusty smoke
and pour cascades of nerve-bright steel
while the slag goes out in little dumpcars smoking,
but even less does he want to be in Today's Action Army
in Vietnam, in the Dominican Republic, in Guatemala,
in death that hurts.
In him are lectures on small groups, Jacksonian democracy,
French irregular verbs, the names of friends
around him in the classroom in Gary in the pillshaped afternoon
where tomorrow he will try and fail his license to live.

Dance the Eagle to Sleep （1970） continues to explore the bewilderment and rebellion of youth in their attempt to build a visionary new society. Piercy was driving herself hard at the time she was working on this novel— getting up at 6:30 A.M. in order to find time to write. She was living in New York with her second husband, Robert Shapiro, and writing came second to political activities. Although she would often give poetry readings for SDS benefits and cultural events, life revolved around the concerns and activities of the movement. In the autobiographical commentary Piercy wrote for Contemporary Authors, she describes the years in New York as “extremely intense, full, densely populated times” and says:

Rarely did Robert and I stay alone in the big sunny rent-controlled apartment on 98th and Broadway. At least fourteen other people lived there at various times for various lengths of time, and every night for supper I was cooking for up to twelve people. I have never been quite so fully involved with numerous people as I was during those years. For Robert and I to be alone, we had to make appointments with each other and arrangements with the others living with us.

It is not surprising that Piercy's health broke and that she became critically ill. Lungs damaged by habitual smoking since the age of twelve gave way to chronic bronchitis, to illness, and a physician's death sentence if she did not stop. An accidental fall complicated earlier back injuries derived from a beating by American Nazi men during an antiwar demonstration in Central Park and from injuries received during a demonstration against the Foreign Policy Association. “A body can grow used / to a weight, / used to limping / and find it hard / to learn again / to walk straight,” Piercy asserts in 4-Telling （1971）.

In both the novel Small Changes and To Be of Use, a book of poems published in the same year, Piercy returns to predominant feminist concerns and begins an exploration of women's struggle to achieve autonomy. Small Changes, Piercy says, is “the equivalent of a full experience in a consciousness-raising group for many women who would never go through that experience.” The issue of what it means to be a “real woman” is revealed in the liberation of the novel's protagonist, Beth Phail. The novel begins with Beth preparing for her wedding as she looks in the mirror of her mother's vanity and becomes the image of her mother's pride, her mother's attitudes, expectations that shape her identity, and vision of herself. “This is the happiest day of your life!” her mother exclaims, “the happiest day!” The way that language functions to preserve stereotypes on one hand and to liberate on the other is an essential feature of Small Changes. The issue is one of definition, that is what it means to be a real woman. Mrs. MacRae, who lived upstairs during Beth's childhood, was not really a woman, Mrs. Phail said, because she had had her organs removed, and that was why she did not have children like everybody else. Although having females organs is an essential qualification for being a real woman, men assert that there are additional requirements. A real woman must be available when a man wants her, and Beth's husband insists that she make herself available or he will end their relationship. Finally Beth is able to define herself according to her own standards and to forge a different kind of relationship, a lesbian involvement with another woman.

The poems in To Be of Use continue to address the evolution of women's social and political consciousness. The first section, “A Just Anger,” begins in exploitation and dependence and works through the difficult task women have in bonding with other women, a necessary prerequisite to fuller consciousness and deliberate action. The use of such consciousness is the concern of “The Spring Offensive of the Snail,” part two of the book. It addresses the issue of what to do after feminine consciousness is raised, and finally, in “Laying Down the Tower,” Piercy takes a feminist perspective in interpreting the symbolism of the ancient Tarot. Myth, history, and politics are united in these poems to examine womanness, its mystery, power, and capacity for growth and change.

With Woman on the Edge of Time Piercy moves into futuristic feminist fiction and creates a different utopia. Masculine visions of the time have dealt with governmental concerns, with economics, and with social classes. Piercy instead sets up a feminist revolution. No longer is childbirth the procreative inheritance of a woman; test-tube babies have arrived. Child bearing is done in brooders for the community, and Luciente, the woman who reaches across time from the future, explains it thus:

It was part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for more power for everyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding.

Piercy seeks to create a future that is free from the stereotypes of gender, but she is not fooled that Connie can be a savior; she is poor, speaks Spanish, has lost her daughter to a foster home, and has been involved in taking drugs. What's more she is held against her will in a mental institution and must fight her way to a future that promises more than oppression. But Piercy shows that there is hope for individuation, a hope that becomes personal in Living in the Open （1976）.

For the first time Piercy gives an autobiographical account of her life. She tells how she came to live on the edge of a fresh-water marsh on Cape Cod, of how it came to be a particular place to be healed. “Finally I have a house / where I return,” she says, a “House half into the hillside, / wood that will weather to the wind's gray, / house built on sand / drawing water like a tree from its roots / where my roots are set / and I return.” It is a place where she is “Kneeling and planting,” “making fertile,” and putting some of herself back in the soil. But it is not utopia, and there are “rough times.” “Those who speak of good and simple / in the same sandwich of tongue and teeth / inhabit some other universe.”

The personal and the political, the emotional and intellectual are inseparable in Piercy's life, and The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing （1978） exemplifies this synthesis. The poetry is organized around the sequence of a year, the diurnal turn from winter to spring, the ease of summer into fall. The seasons of political ferment and activity are joined with the seasons of love and friendship, the seasons of the land. The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing is a solar book with cosmic significance. Everything takes place under the wheel of the sun, including the twelve-spoked microcosmic wheel flashing its earthly seasons. The wheel with its twelve monthly spokes turns year after year but never returns the same way to the same place.

The High Cost of Living, also published in 1978, is a book that deals specifically with the dead-end desperation of some lesbian relationships, and it may be classed as Piercy's least successful novel. Even a critic as positive as Joanna Russ posits reservations. Perhaps it is a too stark and authentic rendition of female homosexuality and as such lacks the humor, the play, of Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, which was well received despite the similarity of its thematic content. Piercy has always seemed to be ahead of her time in dealing with contemporary social and political issues, and she has done this with some risk to popular acclaim, but with an authenticity that should merit more lasting critical recognition and attention.

In Vida （1979）, the underground world of the 1960's and 1970's is probed through the eyes of a female protagonist. Vida, in an attempt to work out her political commitments to SAW （Students Against the War） and a fierce separatist group called the Little Red Wagon, comes to terms with an untenable marriage and attempts to establish a more viable relationship, one in which sex is mutual satisfaction instead of supply and demand. Her lifestyle is portrayed in contrast to her sister's more traditional orientation toward marriage, family, and mothering. Vida is in pursuit of individual interests, political commitments, and social awareness. Two aspects of womanhood are thus surveyed in Vida, and the novel is a commentary on how difficult it is to set aside the indoctrination of past attitudes, behavioral patterns, and psychological conditioning in order to establish a new order of feminine integration into a political, often violent, and dangerous world.

This world is rent by revolution and war on one hand and by a refusal to change, by clinging to a dead past on the other. In The Moon Is Always Female （1980）, Piercy recognizes, as did Anna Freud, that the voice of the intellect is a soft one. Intellectual claims to gain insight and transform experience fail to right the wrongs of the world, set order against chaos, or provide an easy means of dealing with fear, pain, anger, lust, or loss. There must be another way of knowing, and the numinous poems of The Moon is Always Female open a doorway to comprehending the nonrational aspects of being a woman. “There is knowing with the teeth as well as knowing with the tongue,” Piercy says, “and knowing with the fingertips / as well as knowing with words and with all / the fine flickering hungers of the brain.” Women are the first healers; they are the gatherers of herbs and roots, the dispensers of foxglove, thyme, valerian and poppy, of herbs that cure. Harking back to the lunar calendar, the natural evolution of time's turning, the history of woman moves with tidal ebb and flow into a kind of negative capability, the capacity or ability to tolerate, in Keat's definition, uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. In the title poem, “The Moon is Always Female,” Piercy phrases the concept thus:

I am waiting for the moon to rise. Here
I squat, the whole country with its steel
mills and its coal mines and its prisons
at my back and the continent tilting
up into mountains and torn by shining lakes
all behind me on this scythe of straw,
a sand bar cast on the ocean waves, and I
wait for the moon to rise red and heavy
in my eyes. Chilled, cranky, fearful
in the dark I wait and I am all the time
climbing slippery rocks in a mist while
far below the waves crash in the sea caves;
I am descending a stairway under the groaning
sea while the black waters buffet me
like rockweed to and fro.

Earth is the archetypal mother who generates birth and whose seasons typify a girl's development into a woman. It ushers in a bloom of life when a woman is able to choose who will become the flesh of her flesh, a time when “life is a non-negotiable demand.” It is not an easy achievement Piercy notes in “The wrong anger”; there is “infighting,” “gut battles,” “carnage in the fish tank.” There are “Alligators wrestling in bed. / Nuclear attack / across the breakfast table. Duels in the women's center. The fractioning faction fight.” Women face their failing again and again; they grow out of and beyond their mothers and strive toward reconciliation. The poems of The Moon Is Always Female reveal a woman who is secure in her sexuality, a mature woman whose energy and vision are in harmony with her nature.

In 1982 Piercy's career took on new momentum with the publication of two significant works: Circles on the Water and Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt. Circles on the Water is a composite selection of poems from previous works: Breaking Camp, Hard Loving, 4-Telling, To Be of Use, Living in the Open, The Moon is Always Female, plus an addition of seven new poems. This collection provides an overview of Piercy's poetry in a volume that may serve as a text for an integrated study of her major poetic works. The University of Michigan's “Poets on Poetry” edition of Marge Piercy's Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt, adds a critical approach through a collection of articles, interviews, book reviews, and commentary.

Braided Lives, also published in 1982, is set in the 1950's and in it Piercy again demonstrates her ability to reveal American conscience and consciousness. Strictures on women place strictures on an age that needs to move beyond such narrow confines. Braided Lives shows how divisions of class and gender shape future generations.

It is obvious by 1983 that the discipline of art has relegated any polemic to secondary significance, and the question asked in Stone, Paper, Knife—“Who shall bear hope back into the world?”—places Piercy among those active women writers who would like to see man, woman, and the earth joined in warm, interdependent relationships. “Poetry is an utterance that heals on two levels,” Piercy says in Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt. It heals the psyche by blending ways of knowing:

Poetry is a saying that uses verbal signs and images, sound and rhythm, memory and dream images. Poetry blends all different kinds of knowing, the analytical and the synthetic, the rational and the prerational and the gestalt grasping of the new or ancient configuration, the separate and fused hungers and satisfaction and complaints and input of the senses, the knotted fibrous mass of pleasure and pain, the ability to learn and to forget. … Poetry has a healing power because it can fuse for the moment all the different kinds of knowing in its saying.

Poetry can also heal as a communal activity, and Stone, Paper, Knife is a statement of faith that follows an attack on the destructive power of bombs, the pollution of water, the waste of disease. How can we “open our hands and let go / the old dangerous toys we clutch hard,” she asks. “How can we with only stone and paper and knife build with imagination a better game?” Piercy answers that human beings, male and female, need to accept the burden of responsibility. “We must begin with the stone of mass / resistance, and pile stone on stone, / begin cranking out whirlwinds of paper.”

The tone of hope represents several changes in Piercy's personal life, a move to Wellfleet, putting down roots, and finding sustenance and strength in the establishment of home and a marriage to Ira Wood.

The novel, Fly Away Home （1984）, also marks Piercy's turn to bearing hope back into the world. The protagonist of her story, Daria Walker, divorces, establishes her independence, moves toward a more creative and fulfilling relationship and recognizes, at the end of the book, that she is a better woman than she used to be before she was on her own.

It seems that both Piercy's marriage and the death of her mother have marked a period of growth and development in her work. My Mother's Body resolves old dilemmas and affirms an outlook of hope, a capacity for joy. The first series of poems concerns burial and resurrection. A body is put to rest, but what transcends that body lives—in memory, in giving, in being and becoming. The second half of the book represents a new union, a marriage, a going forth.

The lyrics of the 1960's song “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” provide a touchstone for examining Marge Piercy's World War II novel, Gone to Soldiers.

Although the song lyrics differ among various recordings, the major questions and answers are: “Where have all the flowers gone?” Answer: Young girls pick them, every one. “When will they ever learn?” This question is never answered. It is followed by another question: “Where have all the young girls gone?” The answer: Gone to young men—or gone to husbands. “When will they ever learn?” “Where have all the young men gone?” Answer: They have gone for soldiers. The reason for picking flowers is clear with an additional question: “Where have all the graveyards gone?” Answer: Gone to flowers the young girls pick. But the terrible abiding question is left unanswered still. When will they ever learn?

Although World War II was “the war to end all wars,” mankind has not learned its lessons. The Sixties song attests to the terrible cycle of repetition—to the fact that history repeats itself. The final words of Piercy's novel are haunting and prophetic: “The End of One Set of Troubles Is But the Beginning of Another.” Will we ever learn? Gone to Soldiers is a lesson on the consequences of failure. It defines what our failures have been and reinforces the stark refrain—“will we ever learn?”

Because Marge Piercy is a major American poet as well as novelist, it is fitting that the preface to this epic work on war should be a poem about the past carried into the present, about ancestors. Piercy writes:

The survivors have written their own books
and those who perished are too many and too hungry
for this to do more than add a pebble to the cairn
So this is for my grandmother Hannah
who was a solace to my childhood
and who was a storyteller even in the English
that never fit comfortably in her mouth
for the moment when she learned that of her
village, none and nothing remained
for her weak eyes, strong stomach and the tales
she told, her love of gossip, of legend
her incurable romantic heart
her gift for making the past
walk through the present

Marge Piercy, like Grandmother Hannah, is a story-teller, but her audience is not just a granddaughter, the members of her immediate family; it is, instead, the world. And far more than entertainment is involved. Survival is at stake; lessons must be learned—lessons about the consequences of war and violence, lessons about prejudice and religious intolerance and interpersonal relationships. In our humanness, we fail others, and we fail ourselves. Wars are external and internal too.

In reviews of Gone to Soldiers, critics stress the fact that “A woman writer treads on male turf,” that Marge Piercy, in writing about war, has entered into an area reserved for Men. But Piercy, in all of her novels and poems, has seen the world as whole. Her world is one inhabited by women AND men, and its violence affects everyone regardless of gender, age, or race.

Marge Piercy is a humanitarian and as such, there should be no question of gender, of male or female turf. War kills—male and female, adult and child, on the front line, in a classroom or factory, in a residence or a department store. The “Who” that is involved names every human being that inhabits the earth. The “Where” is the United States; it is Germany, Russia, England, Iran, Japan, the World. What have we learned? Will we ever learn?

In 1941, the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation was instructed by the Permanent Committee for Literature and the Arts of the League of Nations to arrange for exchanges of letters between representative intellectuals on subjects deemed of common interest; they asked Albert Einstein to pick a topic for discussion and to choose a person with whom to exchange letters. Einstein chose “Why War?” and in a letter written at Caputh near Potsdam, the 30th of July, 1932, to Professor Sigmund Freud, he asked:

Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? It is common knowledge that, with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for civilization as we know it; nevertheless, for all the zeal displayed, every attempt at its solution has ended in a lamentable breakdown. （Sigmund Freud, ed., James Strachey, 1964）

Einstein's letter is long, but it is worth quoting, at least in part, because it not only illumines Piercy's theme that the end of one set of troubles, namely war, is but the beginning of another, it also explores the seemingly unanswerable question that Einstein raised: “Why War?”.

The lack of success in solving the problem, Einstein wrote, “Leaves us no room to doubt that strong psychological factors are at work, which paralyze these efforts.” He explains:

The craving for power which characterizes the governing class in every nation is hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty. This political power-hunger is wont to batten on the activities of another group, whose aspirations are on purely mercenary lines. I have specially in mind that small but determined group, active in every nation, composed of individuals who, indifferent to social considerations and restraints, regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests and enlarge their personal authority.

The question follows of how a seemingly small clique can bend the will of the majority when they stand to lose and suffer by a state of war, and Einstein comments that he does not exclude “soldiers of every rank who have chosen war as their profession, in the belief that they are serving to defend the highest interests of their race and that attack is often the best defense.” The obvious answer, he says, “would seem to be that the majority, the ruling class … has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb.” This enables the clique “to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.”

In exploring the cause of this situation, Einstein believes that there is only one explanation as to what would rouse “men to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives” and that is “because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction.”

“Is it possible,” Einstein asks Freud, “to control man's mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness?” And he concludes by saying he had been speaking of wars between nations—international conflicts—but that he was aware also that the aggressive instinct operates under other forms and circumstances. He names “the persecution of racial minorities” as an example.

Piercy's Gone to Soldiers might well be called a 1987 answer to Einstein's question. It is a monumental work of ten novels woven into one collection. Its base is World War II, but individual wars between man and man, woman and woman, between woman and man, between families, within the self, are all played out in the lives of ten major characters, each one presenting his or her own individual point of view. Yet each part becomes integrated into the larger anatomy of war. Gone to Soldiers is a hard lesson. But will we ever learn? Perhaps, if we make use of the past, and perhaps part of the lesson could be reading Piercy's important masterpiece of craft and design. Gone to Soldiers should establish Piercy as one of the leading novelists of our time.

Available Light, published by Knopf in 1988, is Piercy's tenth book of poetry. It celebrates political, religious, seasonal, and personal revolutions. Again themes of coming into selfhood, forgiving one's parents, and growing into love are displayed with celerity. The poet, at 50, assesses her life. She examines and affirms her Jewish identity and in doing so, seeks to reconcile religion with her embrace of the ancient earth goddess. She confronts her ambivalence toward her father in “Burial by salt” and says “What was between us was history, not love. / I have striven to be just to you, / stranger, first cause, old man, my father, / and now I give you over to salt and silence.”

In Available Light, Piercy confronts problems of aging, menopause, making love, her own Detroit childhood, society's concern with being forever young, even the annoyance of answering machines. Though she extols country pleasures, Piercy asserts that “life makes women crazy.” “We lose and we go on losing as long as we live,” she says. Yet Piercy's vision is a clear and available light that informs a triumph of understanding one's self, one's relationships, and one's place in the world.

Piercy's Summer People, published in 1989, moves from the political arena of Gone to Soldiers to the social set of summer people on fashionable Cape Cod. The focus is a ten-year-old menage a trois and its tortuous disintegration. It examines the bonds of love that exist between Dinah, a 38 year-old Jewish musician and her bisexual lover, Susan. Dinah is also involved with Susan's husband, Willie, and an avant-garde composer, Itsak Raab. The novel explores, through triangular and one-sided relationships, the difficulty involved in becoming a separate person who is able to fulfill his or her own needs while establishing a healthy reciprocal relationship with another person. Stephen Schiff, in his review of the novel in The New York Times Book Review, calls the novel a “red-hot pastorale” and questions if amid the novel's painful lurching, “we ever begin to understand how a happy, bisexual triangle might work?” Although the bisexual triangle of Dinah and Susan, Dinah and Willie, Willie and Susan, is central to the novel, other relationships are explored as well: Dinah and Raab, Susan and Tyrone Burdock, the wealthy New York art speculator who summers on the other side of the pond; Jimmy and Tyrone's daughter, Laurie. Summer People is a study of codependency. It does not intend to address itself to how a happy bisexual triangle might work—for if such a relationship works and is happy, why explore it further? A primary psychological issue in 1989 is codependency, and Piercy is right on target in showing how addictive relationships destroy the love they intend to nurture.

Throughout her career as novelist and poet, Piercy addresses the hard issues that affect the way people live and love. In the 60's and early 70's this was the issue of feminism and women's rights. In the 80's, it is codependency, but Piercy has not limited herself to the vicissitudes of love. She has addressed issues of religion and culture, and in particular how a Jewish heritage directs one's life. She addresses the psychology of mother-daughter and father-daughter relationships, attitudes toward youth and aging, and on a global scale, Einstein's question of “Why War?” The canon of Piercy's work is impressive in both poetry and fiction. Piercy is a literary force with which to reckon.