and simple poet as Brooks describes, particularly in diction, tone, and form. She writes, she tells us, as a social animal and intends her poems not for other poets, but to be “of use” to the reader; she says, “I am not a poet who writes primarily for the approval or attention of other poets. … Poetry is too important to keep to ourselves.” She admits to occasional didacticism and to conscious feminist politics; she believes that her poems “coax, lecture, lull, seduce, exhort, denounce.” Her poetry reminds us in several ways of the metaphysical tradition but stripped of the intellectual pyrotechnics of that tradition.

Piercy's use of imagery is one of the major assets of her poetic technique. The title of the volume Circles on the Water provides a descriptive metaphor for the recurrent, intertwined, echoic use of images so characteristic of her work. A few of her poems are built upon a single, extended metaphor; among these are “A work of artifice” in which a bonsai tree is compared throughout the poem to the stunted growth of a stereotyped female, and “The best defense is offensive” in which the actions of a turkey vulture are equated with a useful political stance. Much more typical of her work, however, is a lyrical, almost free-flowing series of images, built upon emotional and psychological associations rather than upon logical paradox or metaphysical conceit. Like circles on water created when a pool's surface tension is disturbed, her images form concentric, ever-widening patterns linked only by the energy and force of the precipitating experience. Usually, we are made fully aware of the initial event, for Piercy often begins with a narrative and maintains a strong sense of time and place. The force and energy of the image patterns is, therefore, one of the most exciting and unique qualities of the poems, but a quality not easily analyzed.

One of the poems which most clearly and dramatically displays the image-by-association artistry through which Piercy constructs an organic whole is “Sign,” written in 1967 and included in her first published volume, Breaking Camp. As in the majority of her poems, Piercy provides a dramatic narrative structure; an event in the present precipitates contemplation. In “Sign,” this event is quite commonplace—the poet discovers an emblem of aging:

The first white hair coils in my hand,
more wire than down.
Out of the bathroom mirror it glittered at me.
I plucked it, feeling thirty creep in my joints,
and found it silver. It does not melt.

This brief opening stanza contains four images which are interwoven throughout the remainder of the poem in a carefully orchestrated, psychological point counter-point. The hair itself is the focal object, but one made up of several different sense impressions. The hair has color （white, then silver）, texture （more “wire” than “down”）, and substance （unlike quicksilver, it does not “melt” at body warmth）. Furthermore, the hair is seen in a mirror, glitters, and is “plucked.” Then, the poet feels thirty “creep” in her joints.

These visual, tactile, and kinaesthetic impressions of the hair are repeated in the next stanza, but within a completely different time and place:

My twentieth birthday lean as glass
spring vacation I stayed in the college town
twangling misery's electric banjo offkey.
I wanted to inject love right into the veins
of my thigh and wake up visible:
to vibrate color
like the minerals in stones under black light.
My best friend went home without loaning me money.
Hunger was all of the time the taste of my mouth.

This shift to past time is perfectly natural; finding a white hair at thirty precipitates a realistic and commonplace reaction; the subject remembers her twentieth birthday. What is not so commonplace is the subtle, almost incremental, repetition of images from the first stanza, given new meaning in this different context. The mirror in which she first sees the hair is now transformed into her body, for she is “lean as glass.” She spends time “twanging” an electric banjo “offkey,” as in the first stanza she “plucked” the offending wire-like hair. Both actions call up misery, an emotion. At twenty, she twangs “misery's” banjo; at thirty, she experiences the misery of awareness of aging. The hair is, in its natural state, white or silver, almost colorless; at twenty, she had wanted to “vibrate color,” but as minerals do, under “black” light. In both stanzas, the parts of the body receive attention. At twenty, she wished to inject love directly into “veins” and “thigh.” At thirty, age is felt creeping into her “joints.” Finally, in the second stanza, a new sense impression is added to the catalogue of recurrent images; “hunger” and “taste” provide a gustatory dimension which will be repeated in the third stanza, as the poet returns to present time:

Now I am ripened and sag a little from my spine.
More than most I have been the same ragged self
in all colors of luck dripping and dry,
yet love has nested in me and gradually eaten
those sense organs I used to feel with.
I have eaten my hunger soft and my ghost grows stronger.

The love which the subject wished to inject into thigh and vein in her twentieth year, when she was lean, constantly hungry, and eager for an awakening to visible self, has now “nested” in her and gradually “eaten” her sense organs. The aging process of which she has become dramatically aware causes her spine to sag, as a parallel to the creeping of age into her joints in stanza one. The hunger of her college vacation now consumes itself, but her “ghost” grows stronger although she is the “same ragged self” with “all colors of luck” within her. The word “ghost” appears intentionally ambiguous, open to several interpretations, all of which may best be treated after examination of the final stanza which brings together again the colors, textures, and motions of the opening lines:

Gradually, I am turning to chalk,
to humus, to pages and pages of paper,
to fine silver wire like something a violin
could be strung with, or somebody garroted,
or current run through: silver truly,
this hair, shiny and purposeful as forceps
if I knew how to use it.

Once again, the color motif returns to become central to the message. Chalk and paper are white or colorless, as is the found hair. Humus is dark, as is black light, and as are youthful tresses. With these colors, attention to the ambiguity of aging is further disclosed. Darkness （or blackness） is both life-giving and death-dealing. Black light brings up colors in minerals; humus is fertile loam; dark hair is abundantly youthful growth. On the other hand, humus is soil, black soil, the earth to which we return in death. Black light is an artificial means which uncovers natural mineral beauty hidden to the naked eye, just as death perhaps transforms the soul （or “ghost”）, or as a mirror brings attention to the sign of aging. White is played upon equally paradoxically. Now the subject becomes white chalk and colorless paper, inert, yet potentially productive. The coarse white hair of the opening stanza has become “fine silver wire” strung into a violin, in sharp contrast to the wire strung into an offkey electric banjo in her twentieth year. Paradoxically, however, this same fine silver wire is associated with death by garroting or by electrocution. Finally, the hair shines as purposefully and usefully as forceps, instruments commonly associated with birth rather than death. The poet ultimately perceives in the silver wire-hair a power as ambiguous as the images employed to re-tell the experience. Life or death, creativity or repression, growth or stagnation—the meaning lies not within the discovered object itself, the emblem of aging, but within the human spirit. The ghost which grows stronger within the poet may be death or life; the outcome depends upon the qualifying clause, “If I knew how to use it.”

This intensive study of the images in “Sign” demonstrates the intricate networking and intertwining of seemingly disparate elements which is one of the great strengths of Piercy's poetic vision. While not every poem in her canon is so full of leit-motifs as is “Sign,” patterns of psychological association appear in many other places in her work. A brief glance at three other pieces can identify the pattern. In “Erasure” from the volume Hard Loving, the poet's subject is the loss of a lover. Images of light, vision, and a mouse graphically convey the emotional impact of the experience. The poet moves from “blood turned grey,” to a burning out of the “glittering synapses of the brain,” to “stars fading in the galaxy,” and on to a picture of the imaginary animal figures of the constellations that “would photograph more like a blurry mouse.” Falling out of love she then defines as a “correcting vision” which nevertheless damages the optic nerve. The final lines of the poem powerfully unite all these loosely connected images:

To find you have loved a coward and a fool
is to give up the lion, the dragon, the sunburst
and take away your hands covered with small festering bites
and let the mouse go in a grey blur
into the baseboard.

A further example of Piercy's technique is found in the poem “Some collisions bring luck” which is from her third volume, To Be of Use. A chance meeting with a lover during the month of October provides the poem's speaker with momentary relief from the state of mind with which she opens the narrative:

I had grown invisible as a city sparrow.
My breasts had turned into watches.
Even my dreams were of function and meeting.

The chance encounter is reported in the ten lines of the next stanza. The setting is a “pumpkin afternoon”; the lover is “bright rind carved into a knowing grin.” The couple run upstairs, and at the lover's sexual touch, the poet “flew open.” Soon, “orange and indigo feathers” break through her skin and she rolls in the lover's “coarse rag-doll hair.” She sucks the lover “like a ripe apricot down to the pit.” The images circle around the visions and colors of fall, orange and apricot, like the hair of a Raggedy-Ann doll. Once again, the concluding lines of the stanza switch from objects to emotions:

Sitting crosslegged on the bed we chattered
basting our lives together with ragged stitches.

In the closing stanza, the stitches do not hold, yet the warmth of the chance encounter in the October afternoon replaces the mechanical self expressed in the opening lines:

Of course it all came apart
but my arms glow with the fizz of that cider sun.
My dreams are of mating leopards and bronze waves.
We coalesced in the false chemistry of words
rather than truly touching
yet I burn cool glinting in the sun
and my energy sings like a teakettle all day long.

One final example from the volume The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing, a poem entitled “The window of a woman burning” will underscore what Piercy accomplishes with her rich imagery. The poem opens with what appears to be the realistic description of a woman caught up in a fire, her hair a “cone of orange snakes,” as she writhes in flames. Quickly, however, the burning woman is differentiated from other martyrs; she is neither a Joan at the stake nor a crucified madonna or saint. She is, instead, “the demon of a fountain of energy,” energy which flows from her brain, from her fiery hair:

flickering lights from the furnace in the solar
plexus, lush scents from the reptilian brain,
river that winds up the hypothalamus
with its fibroids of pleasure and pain
twisted and braided like a rope,
firing the lanterns of the forebrain
till they glow blood red.

The next stanza emphasizes the strong fire-woman's dance, in “beauty that crouches / inside like a cougar in the belly / not in the eyes of others measuring.” This transformed woman leaps through a green forest. In the final stanza, she becomes “the icon of woman sexual,” who is “with the cauldrons of her energies / burning red, burning green.” From the opening images of death by fire and sacrifice to the concluding image of red and green as life and growth in the sexual cycle, Piercy bombards the senses with quick, agile turns of impression that somehow hold together. What Marge Piercy accomplishes with her circling, concentric, seemingly disparate images is exciting, fresh, and flexible poetry as demanding of the reader as any metaphysical performance by Donne. With Piercy, as with Donne, we are always in touch with the human elements, body and mind, flesh and spirit. Piercy's purposeful and powerful use of images is perhaps most clearly stated in her own words. Introducing a series of poems based upon the Tarot deck, she says:

We must break through the old roles to encounter our own meanings in the symbols we experience in dreams, in songs, in vision, in meditation. … What we use we must remake. Then only are we not playing with dead dreams but seeing ourselves more clearly, and more clearly becoming.

Piercy is, then, constructing a poetic vehicle through which old ways of seeing, old ways of knowing, are wrenched out of old contexts to be given new meaning. True to the feminist movement which she claims changed her life, she intends to break with linear, patriarchal patterns in favor of circles, moons, emotions superior to logic. These form a dialectic which teaches us, as she says in her recent poem “Digging in”:

You are learning to live in circles
as well as straight lines