["Circles on the Water"] is gathered from 20 years of poetry and includes poems from seven books. Just cause for jubilation, since anyone who can survive 20 years of serious poetry writing in America right now deserves a medal of some sort. Also for retrospection: For those of Miss Piercy's age, this book will read like a cross section of their own archeology, for perhaps no other poet of this generation has more consistently identified herself with the political and social movements of her own times. (p. 10)

Miss Piercy has the double vision of the utopian: a view of human possibility—harmony between the sexes, among races and between humankind and nature—that makes the present state of affairs clearly unacceptable by comparison. The huge discrepancy between what is and what could be generates anger, and many of these are angry poems—which, for those who want poetry to be nothing but beautiful, will mean points off. Because her poetry is so deliberately "political"—which, for some, means anything not about ghosts and roses—how you feel about it will depend on how you feel about subjects such as male-female relations, abortion, war and poverty. Those who don't like these subjects will use adjectives like "shrill" to describe the poems. It's only during certain phases of American intellectual history that divisions are made between "poetry" and "politics," however; as Miss Piercy herself points out in her rather disarming introduction, the gap would not have been recognized by "Sophocles, Virgil, Catullus, Chaucer, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley, Arnold, Whitman, Blake, Goethe."

As Miss Piercy also points out, her poetry is both "personal"—that is, it has the recognizable speaking voice of an individual human being, not a voice issuing from behind a vatic ceremonial mask—and "public," meaning both that it addresses itself to public issues and that it is for a public. With some of these poems, one can almost hear not only the reading voice but the murmurs of response and the spontaneous applause at appropriate rhetorical moments. Taken as a whole—and I recommend you do so only slowly, as this is rich fare—this collection presents the spectacle of an agile and passionate mind rooted firmly in time and place and engaging itself with the central dilemmas of its situation…. Sometimes Miss Piercy's is a bewildered and lonely voice, albeit a voice that admits to such quailings. Her position has not been an easy or sheltered one. As she says, "a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid."

If poets could be divided into Prioresses and Wives of Bath, Miss Piercy would very definitely be a Wife of Bath. Low on fastidiousness and high on what Hazlitt called "gusto," earthy, bawdy, interested in the dailiness of life rather than in metaphysics, highly conscious of the power relationships between men and women but seeing herself by no means as a passive victim, she is ready to enter the fray with every weapon at her command. She is, in sum, a celebrant of the body in all its phases, including those that used to be thought of as vulgar. Surprisingly, her poetry is more humorous than her novels, although not all of it is what you'd call funny. The Wife of Bath was sometimes a savage ironist, and so is Miss Piercy. Neither has much interest in being ladylike. (pp. 10-11)

Essentially her poetry is a poetry of statement and story, and metaphor and simile are, characteristically, used by her as illustration rather than as structural principle….

Miss Piercy's emotional range is great, and at her best she can make you laugh, cry, get angry; she can inspire you with social purpose and open doors through which you may walk into lived reality…. Miss Piercy's scale, even in her "nature" poems, which are more likely to be about zucchini and lettuces and compost heaps than tigers and loons, is human and encompasses all the grandeur and trivia that scale demands. The sublime and the infernal for her are situated in the here and now.

In a collection with so many high points, it's difficult to single out one or two. But for me Miss Piercy in top form … is to be found in "Crescent moon like a canoe," a sad, courageous and moving poem that is not only about her own mother but about her own motives for poetry. This is poetry both wide open and fully controlled, flexible, tender, clear-sighted and compassionate, an act of forgiveness. Miss Piercy is finally a hopeful poet, but it's a hope that has been long and bitterly fought for. (p. 22)