Marge Piercy Percey Shelly Once

Marge Piercy Percey Shelly once said, "Poets are the emotional state more sensitive to feelings, emotions and ideals and they can color all of them with the divine colors of imagination. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most gorgeous in the world.

It catches the vanishing moments of the beauty." What, then, is a more apropos way to look at life than through a rainbow prism? Every day, people confront, for good and bad, an array of colors -- the dismal and fearful blacks and grays, the cheerful and pleasant yellows and reds. Poet and novelist Marge Piercy rightly adds, "One of the functions of poetry has always been to articulate for people, to give dignity to people's experiences, their sufferings, their pleasures, the dramas of their lives" (Piercy website).

One of her most recent book of poems, Colors Passing Through Us, with her typical rich metaphors, imagery, irony and strong attention to sound, offers a visual glimpse into the joy, sadness, and foibles of present times. Thematically, similar to her other poetry books, Colors Passing Through Us includes an assortment of feminist, political, lovemaking, joys and absurdities of life. In short, they provide a close-up view of humanity in all is shades.

As a poet," Piercy states, "everything you experience, whether personally or vicariously or virtuously or, even virtually, for that matter, is your stuff. You have to stay open and curious and keep learning as you go" (Piercy website). Thus, regardless whether Piercy's verse is about something she experienced firsthand in life, or someone else did, she writes in such a way that anyone can identify with the poetry.

In the first section of Colors, it is easy to feel close to Piercy's mother in the "good old days," sitting on a tenement step, washing and hanging clothes, ironing her husband's underwear and screaming and looking ashamed and abashed after having an abortion. Likewise, for those readers who are fortunate enough not have lost someone close, they can still feel deeply for the family that Piercy writes about who lost its favorite pet cat, a parent on September 2001, a loved one in a country's violently torn civil war.

Conversely, for those who have never experienced the look and feel of snow on a beach, the making dance of hawks high in the sky, the play of darkness and light of a solstice eclipse, and the warm brown eye of a virgin doe, are able to envision these delights in their mind. With Colors Passing Through Us, are here, also, the unfortunate eccentricities of the newly dawned 21st Century: The women who work at the department store cosmetic counters..

"molded of superior plastic or light metal," who could "be shot up into orbit never missing a hair, make-up intact." Or, the vain person who goes under the "scalpel once, twice, seven times, for lipsuction, face lifts, eye jobs, botulin inserted under the skin, a peel or two." Or the "progress" in the "dirty old century" of the bellowing machinery that would "set you free and bring abundance to everyone.

No one will be hungry, no one will die of thirst." But then "came the war to end all wars, then the bigger war after that." This lead to the "21st century blues," where "windows crashed Dragon/Email is out all day," so the time is spent "waiting for the cable guy/waiting for the furnace man to come / waiting for Microsoft to answer/waiting for the cable company to call back" and so "glad all these gadgets have made" life so *****ing convenient that relaxation can come no more.

Or, the divorce that is a "gradual poisoning of the field that once before had healthy crops." It is not that Piercy wants to paint a negative picture of life. She is showing the readers the colors on the easel of life in all its richness, all its pain, all its pleasure. When finishing one or several of her poems, there is not a feeling of total despondency or of complete elation, but rather an acknowledgement that this is what life is all about.

The various threads of her poems are interwoven to provide the many sights in life's journey. Throughout Colors, the visions grow like the garden Piercy writes of with its reds and yellows she enjoys or the rising smoke of the Sabbath candles. Piercy does not expect that everyone will identify with each of her poems. Instead, some verses are more an outlet for herself, some for the general public, and some that move on by themselves and find their own words without her knowing which way they will go.

She says that some of the poems are written at once, others take years to come alive. Some of the poems are about fond memories of her grandmother, cooking with her mother before she died, the feelings of making love, some are of then some are of now. All, as in Colors, show the many hues of life.

As Piercy states, "One of the functions of poetry has always been to articulate for people, to give dignity to people's experiences, their sufferings, their pleasures, the dramas of their lives." According to Steven Ratiner about her works: "poetry is built upon a communal voice. Reaching beyond the purely subjective, you seem to be speaking both to and for your audience. There are even a few of the poems.. that start out with "I" but wind up speaking "we." (Daiches website).

However, it is much more than the theme of life that makes Piercy's poems so memorable. It is the stylistic gems she applies that are even more rich and rewarding to readers. First are the evocative metaphors that flow and follow one another like waves crashing into a beach.

They sometimes overlap one another, bubbling over from one free verse stanza to the next as in "Photograph of my mother sitting on the steps." My mother who isn't anyone's Just her own intact and yearning self complete as a birch tree sits on the tenement steps.

She is awkwardly lovely, her face Pure as a single trill perfectly Prolonged on a violin, yet she knows the camera sees her and she arranges her body like a flower in a vase to be displayed, admired she hopes She longs to be luminous. Similarly, in "Lost": Your dreams float on the night pale streamers dissolving in moonlight Like thin wafers. You weep milk. It rises.

And "The day my mother died" like a lover into my arms and I sighed, Drew the curtains and examined The face of the day. In addition are the repetitious poems where Piercy uses repetition that is as much for hearing and sound by reading out loud than for reading to oneself.

She says, "For me the saying of the poem is its primary life and the record on the page is the notation by which you bring it to life when you say it, either actually aloud or in your head" (Marge Piercy website).

As in "How it goes with us" Love is the secret ling of the day, Love is the taste of cappuccino in bed In the mornings while the cats walk Round us and light streams in the east Windows across the marsh where night herons nest, and through the talk stark pines. Love is the word underlying silence. Love is the secret tether stretching between us, gossamer steel. Love is the road we walk on toward death and as we climb its hardscabble rocks our hands are invisibly joined.

Or Piercy's word plays as in "Burnishing memory": I am learning how to remember Little colored crayon numbs of my childhood The sun coming through mason jars Of peaches still scalding from the canner The fat chalk the brakemen would throw When we begged, perfect For scrawling dirty words on sidewalks.

And, she often uses alliteration for theme and for sound, the mixture of both making the poem much more than it was: "her hair, her heart slowing," "or left untouched, turned something," "too wild, too wooly, trailing." Piercy states, "I work very hard to make the meaning of my poems clear. If the images are surrealistic or dream images, I try to make the poem emotionally clear, clear in its drift, its context.

If what I mean does not communicate well or is confusing without any gain for that confusion -- and I can think of very few cases where I have desired ambiguity-then I rework the poem and rework it until I think it says what it must, on all the levels it says" (Piercy website). And, in this book, most of all, naturally uses the poetry imagery of color, for this combines her theme of life.

What is more human, more of life that color? And all that it encompasses, as well as the title of her book, Color Passing Through Us. Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the.