Poetry for Students

80 Poetry for Students

Source:Roger Housden, “Back from the Edge,” in Ten Po-

ems to Last a Lifetime, Harmony Books, 2004, pp. 59–64.

Alison Townsend

In the following excerpted review of What We

Carry, Townsend calls Laux’s voice “taut, tough,

sensuous” and asserts that the poems in this col-

lection “teach us how to give ourselves up to the

world, how to love.”

Often when I read women’s poetry I realize

that I am trying to understand what kind of ethos

or personal mythology the poet is creating. What

is her relationship to time, place, history? How does

this intersect with home, work, love, family? What

kind of self-portrait has the poet created, and how

does this reflect her self-image and her relationship

with the outside world?... Dorianne Laux writes

a poetry of gritty and tender self-disclosure that

documents life as a creative woman in late

twentieth-century America....

I read Dorianne Laux’s first book, Awake,with

enormous pleasure, and have eagerly awaited the

publication of her second, What We Carry.Laux’s

voice is taut, tough, sensuous. Her province is the

ordinary world as it reveals itself to be miraculous,

whether in a rainbowed pool of oil at a gas station,

the sight of her daughter leaning into the side of a

horse, a car full of women friends singing, or the

mystery and beauty of her husband’s body. Her

For the Sake of Strangers