Shortly after I agreed to review Marge Piercy's latest collection of poems, The Moon Is Always Female, two poets warned me that this was a disappointing collection. Two other friends told me they had not yet read the book but they had heard it was not very good. Maybe it's true this time, I thought. The title, after all, did not seem promising, and all poets—especially prolific poets with great technical facility—do tend to repeat themselves.

I should have known better….

The first two poems of "The Lunar Cycle" (the second section of the book) are alone worth the price of admission. The point is that when many magazines and publishers are printing poems and volumes of moderate technical proficiency and no energy at all, Piercy is continuing to write poems that matter to people's lives, men's lives as well as women's.

Some other things need to be said right off. There are three things that Piercy does technically as well as any American poet writing. She is the American master of the simile. In poem after poem similes continually startle a reader…. Secondly, she repeats phrases until they become litanies, but the phrases are colloquial, grounded in American speech…. Finally—and this is a more recent development—she has mastered long sentences that build, line after line, to a crescendo, and these she usually follows with short, simple sentences.

Yes, sometimes a simile seems contrived; it merely surprises. Like all prolific poets, Piercy sometimes does repeat herself, and a reader can say, "She has done that better elsewhere." Yes, some poems are relatively weak measured by the extremely high standards Piercy has set for herself. But Piercy writes with a learned intelligence. She simply knows more, in more detail, than most other poets know, and that knowledge may be the intimate experience of tides or the book knowledge of the behavior of dolphins. Both come alive in the poems. She is invariably passionate, even in quiet poems. And—what reviewers often forget because of the seriousness and political character of much of her work—she is a very funny poet. Auditors often laugh at Piercy's readings—not quiet, knowing chuckles, but roars full of gusto. An attentive reader of her books will do the same thing….

Piercy also writes quiet, sure poems of precise observation—of her cats, for example, or a spider in the garden. She writes many love poems, some of them tender, some poems of anger and struggle. Often humor comes into fierce poems unexpectedly. Most readers will find themselves laughing, sometimes in the midst of intense seriousness—maybe a bitter laugh in the middle of an angry poem, but often a laugh full of relief and release. Humor, after all, is perspective; it keeps us going….

"The Lunar Cycle" is an ambitious and, I think, successful sequence. There is a poem for each lunar month, and the poems range from "The Right to Life," which is primarily a public and political poem, to "The great horned owl," a poem about Piercy's own life and observations in late Cape Cod autumn, and "The longest night," based upon the poet's winter drive to Kansas City. Cumulatively, the poems reflect the various months of the lunar calendar, the year beginning with spring and ending with deep winter. They are variously private and public, among and within themselves. Piercy does not need to say that the personal and political are one; she illustrates the fact in poem after poem. So "The Lunar Cycle" is at once her personal year, the year of the seasons (especially on Cape Cod), and the year of public events. It is a feminist calendar and a far more comfortable one than that on which we base our dates….

Then why the attacks? Why even the second-hand comments that a new book is not so good? I don't know the answers to those questions, but, given some of my sources, I doubt the answer is jealousy. Piercy, after all, continually offends. She is obstinately uppity. She is consistently radical in her politics, whatever the national trends. She names enemies. She is scholarly but thoroughly unacademic. And she is a highly intelligent (and emotional) woman writer who often aggressively flaunts her sexual nature. Any one of these characteristics is enough to make a particular reader want to cut her down. But, like the oak tree she writes about in her own yard, Piercy just keeps sprouting new leaves.