SYNOPSIS
Following on the celebrated success of her first book of poems, Monster--which was well received for its technical accomplishments and became a "cause celebre" among women for its impassioned articulation of feminist consciousness--came this second volume of poems. Here, Morgan developed even more lyrical and unified means of expression to embody the work of a woman mature in her craft.
Short lyrics cluster around four themes: blood ties, activism and art, love between two women, and woman as archetype. These set off the four major metaphysical poems: "The City of God" encounters existential despair in the search for grace; "Easter Island" reveals the ironies of transcendence as evidenced in relationships; "The Network of the Imaginary Mother" delineates the creation of a mystical self; and "Voices from Six Tapestries" interweaves six dramatic monologues based on the great Cluny Tapestries.
This book went into four printings in hardcover--highly unusual for a book of poems--and "The Network of the Imaginary Mother" became a performance piece in numerous women's theatrical productions, as well as the liturgical text for a "women's Mass" used by rebellious nuns in the Roman Catholic Church.
REVIEWS
Robin Morgan's Lady of the Beasts is even better than her first book, the controversial, stirring Monster. . . . 'The Covenant' is a formally perfect poem, with its insistent tetrameter iambs and alternate slant rhymes. Morgan's work is irresistably energetic and absorbing. In 'The Network of the Imaginary Mother,' the parallel syntax, the catalogues, the yoking together of disparate elements, and the unflinching grip on life itself recall Whitman, the figure behind much of the best poetry writen in our time. Robin Morgan will one day be regarded as one of our first-ranking poets.--POETRY
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