Because of Marge Piercy's strong views on social reform, from the very beginning her work has almost automatically divided people into two groups: those opposed to wide-sweeping social reform, and those in favor of it. Nevertheless she finds herself in the rather ambiguous position of being recognized, even embraced, by both the Movement, loosely-bound groups dedicated to radical change in American life, and the Establishment. She writes about radical living styles, communes, war protests, and women's liberation; yet her books are published by such institutions as Pocket Books and Doubleday. The standard technique of propaganda, over-simplification, separates "them" from "us" in her work; yet once this distinction has been made, her best work, while retaining elements of propaganda, notes similarities between the two groups as well as differences. While it focuses on the social problems of America, it focuses also on her own personal problems, so that tension exists not only between "us" and "them," but between "us" and "me."

Not content to wait for happiness and prosperity in some other life, she is driven to find a social and personal happiness on this earth, and the driving force behind her poetry is a stubborn utopian vision. At the same time she remains aware—almost too aware—of the obstacles, social and personal, confronting her. In "The Peaceable Kingdom" (Breaking Camp …), she comments on the famous American painting by Edward Hicks wherein all animals live side by side in idyllic harmony. (pp. 205-06)

The poem contrasts Hicks's fantasy with the actual history of the United States…. This contrast between American dream and American reality motivates Marge Piercy's poetry. (pp. 206-07)

Her first book, Breaking Camp …, presents a rather strange mixture of styles. "Last Scene in the First Act" …, a clever, ironic meditation on a pair of lovers, shows the slick poetic technique of the academic poets of the 1950's…. In "A Cold and Married War" she complains of her lover's indifference: "His cock crowed / I know you not." There is even a sonnet. But in spite of such superficial cleverness, a breathing person moves behind the poetry. We know her life, her concerns.

The first poem in the book, "Visiting a Dead Man on a Summer Day" … shows the poet in Graceland cemetery in Chicago where she has gone to visit the tomb of Louis Sullivan. She compares his grave with the Getty tomb and sees the contrast as symbolic of American life. (p. 207)

[This poem] has much in common with propaganda. Its subjects, the country, the past, the poor, are so vast that the poet cannot hope to develop completely her thoughts about them. Instead she relies on a common interpretation of history which she assumes she shares with the reader. The image of the poor housed in sewers and filing cabinets is a startling exaggeration which serves both poetry and propaganda. And the extreme imagery reinforces the basic divisions of the poem. On the one hand we have the heavy, the cold, the mechanical, and the closed-in darkness (mausoleum, iron, sewers, filing cabinets, and Chicago itself); on the other we have the light, the heat, and the organic (men, grass, meteor). Yet much of the impact of the poem comes from imagery that unexpectedly applies to both sides. People burn their body heat naturally, but they are also burned to death by mechanical means in Southeast Asia. And the state, which throughout the poem is associated with the cold and the mechanical, has a "vast rumbling gut" which digests its members—and we are shocked by the natural imagery in its unnatural context.

The basic imagery of "Visiting a Dead Man on a Summer Day"—even the title contains the basic contrast between cold and heat—is expanded throughout the rest of Breaking Camp, which itself progresses through summer and winter and ends with the approach of spring. "S. Dead," "Hallow Eve with Spaces for Ghosts," and "Landed Fish" (which concerns the death of her Uncle Danny) are other poems which treat the relationship between the living and the dead. Body heat between lovers is reflected in the stars of the cosmos, and the image of the meteor, so seemingly casual in the last parts of "Visiting a Dead Man" and "The Peaceable Kingdom" underlies the entire book, indeed her entire utopian vision. Everything and everybody loses heat. People burn—literally in Vietnam, figuratively in love, and even mythologically when the sun god visits a sunbather and burns her to ashes. (pp. 208-09)

In contrast "The Simplification" … presents a capitalist, who like the poet, burns—but with coldness instead of heat. And his "burning" moves the business world…. Rooms revolve (beautiful word!) around him like planets around a sun, and suddenly we move from the specific to the general. The basic opposition of the two systems results not only from their differences in America in the 1960's but from their elemental opposition throughout the galaxies of our universe.

But, as the title "The Simplification" suggests, the poet is not content to rest with such broad division between the good and the bad. In "The 184th Demonstration" … she notes uneasily similarities between the two. (p. 209)

In the final poem of the book, "Breaking Camp" … spring begins, but it brings no corresponding regeneration to the human spirit. "Peace," the poet confesses, "was a winter hope." Civilization appears to be breaking up; an atomic holocaust threatens…. The poet and her lover, isolated from the rest of the world, follow their star, though significantly it is a private star, an inward light, "the north star of your magnetic conscience." The community seems to have vanished.

Hard Loving … bears a two line dedication: "from the Movement/to the Movement." The prefatory poem, "Walking into Love" …, which seems to continue the journey begun in the last poem of her previous book, sets a double focus.

          The eyes of others
          measure and condemn.
          The eyes of others are watches ticking no.
          My friend hates you.
          Between you I turn and turn
          holding my arm as if it were broken.

She seeks a personal and a social love, and both come hard. "Others" oppose the lovers. Even in her own group, one of her friends hates the lover (no half-way emotions in Piercy's circles). The poet is torn not only between society in general and her lover, but between him and a close friend; and this fragmentation of the radicals, the "we" of Piercy's elemental opposites, sets the tone of the book.

In the first of three sections, "The Death of the Small Commune," she shows the difficulties of building a new society. "Community" … presents a demonstration in front of the Pentagon, "our Bastille," where generals "armed like Martians" seem to lack even the appearance of humans. Yet the next two poems show the defenseless poet threatened not by generals but by those around her. She no longer distinguishes between "them" and "us" but between "them" and "me." In "Embryos" … she is so frail that the very size of the physical world menaces her…. Then come poems concerning other members of the small commune, and the last three poems in the section deal with falling out of love, first with an individual, then with the community itself. (pp. 210-11)

Then she withdraws from the commune into a new personal relationship. Her social sense, always present, seems less imperative. When love comes, it is simple, intense, and physical…. Such love restores the poet…. (pp. 211-12)

Yet she cannot conceive an idealistic love that transcends the flesh. In "Crabs" … she looks at coitus from the point of view of the insects, a technique well suited to mocking romantic love…. The final lines of this apparently whimsical poem show the poet's bitterness…. The boundary between the real and the ideal remains. Indeed, the title Hard Loving seems like an understatement.

The poet then returns to a social context in the third section, "Curse of the Earth Magician," striving to broaden her love so that she can share it with all her comrades. The symbol of the Pentagon returns. In spite of the failures in the first section, the poet here tries again to recapture at least part of the American dream, the Peaceable Kingdom. The man she loves serves not as a retreat into domesticity and the white suburbs but as a symbol of what society too can accomplish. Emboldened by her love, she speaks with a new certainty. A fatalistic Nordic philosophy runs through the section…. One must fight, though the battle and even the war might well be lost. Her fatalism, rage, and love make a haunting poetry, a poetry of propaganda such as we have not yet had in America. (p. 212)

The book ends with humanity at the point of making one of its most crucial choices. "Sisters and brothers in movement," she proclaims, "we carry in the wet cuneiform of proteins / the long history of working to be human." Mankind must either "fail into ashes, / fail into metal and dry bones and paper,/or break through into a sea of shared abundance/where man shall join man / in salty joy, in flowing trust."

But in To Be of Use … we find a different kind of fragmentation of the "sisters and brothers" of the Movement. Here men are equated with the mechanical life-destroying forces in the universe, women with the natural life-enhancing ones. The first section of the book, "A Just Anger," is composed of poems of outrage, an outrage directed, for the most part, against the male establishment that has condemned the poet and her sisters to secondary roles in life. Unfortunately most of the poems in this section fail as poetry because both oppressed and oppressors are utterly predictable. Yet if the level of poetry is somewhat below Piercy's usual standards because her rage is directed exclusively at "them," the poems are nevertheless important in that they present an aspect of the real world so far from the American dream that merely to describe it becomes a call for social reform.

The second section is more optimistic. The poet includes several love poems, although sex here is less a unification than a collision—sometimes an explosion…. In "Doing It Differently" she seeks new relationships between male and female, but social institutions intrude. The problem remains that personal equality cannot come without a corresponding change in institutions, which in turn cannot change without new personal relationships. (pp. 213-14)

The third section consists of eleven poems to woodcuts of tarot cards. Among the author's most ambitious work, they attempt nothing less than a remaking of some of the myths behind western culture…. [Her] emphasis on myth, as opposed to plain truth or lies, implies an emphasis on the non-rational, the subconscious, the archetypal, which hitherto have played but a small role in her work. (pp. 214-15)

The book ends with one of Marge Piercy's strangest poems, one which presents a mystic utopian vision of the future as a wondrous Child. But unlike her earlier glance at the Peaceable Kingdom, when she consciously reminded herself and the reader of the animals she had eaten, here is none of the rationality of the earlier experience. She who has always been so certain with words finds that she can describe her vision only in negative terms and questions. It blinds her, stuns her. (p. 215)

Marge Piercy's work as a whole shares much with propaganda: passionate commitment, power, and simplicity. Her poetry is emotional, righteous, and often clever, lacking, by and large, the subtle insights and revelations of wisdom, though it may be developing them. In her passion for a new order she sees motes everywhere, even in her own eyes, and casts them out with a vengeance—sometimes so violently she takes the eyes out with them. Much of her energy appears negative: she opposes more strongly than she supports; she hates more passionately than she loves. Yet in spite of these characteristics, or perhaps because of them, a vision of an ideal life, a Peaceable Kingdom, pervades her work, a vision that remains impressive precisely because she must work so hard to maintain it. (p. 216)

Victor Contoski, "Marge Piercy: A Vision of the Peaceable Kingdom," in Modern Poetry Studies (copyright 1977, by Jerome Mazzaro), Vol. VIII, No. 3, Winter, 1977, pp. 205-16.