The American Century: Literature since 1945 625in her use of traditional form. In her first collection, Eve (1997), for example, she
deploys a wide variety of poetic forms, including chants and triple meter, to rehearse
and celebrate different expressions of female power. In her second, Calendars (2002),
she develops her commitment to the female principle by relating major life events,
such as marriage (“A Wedding on Earth”) and pregnancy (“Belly”), to the rhythms
of nature and the seasons. And in subsequent poems she has tried to reclaim the
sentimental poetry of earlier American women writers, to reinvent a form of resist-
ance to the traditional lyric, a valid and fundamentally original means of female
empowerment and self-expression. Salter is less deliberately feminist. Many of her
poems focus on her extensive travels, using her encounters with the foreign as tropes
for a journey into otherness, different visions and perspectives. Her work, gathered
together in such collections as Unfinished Painting (1988), uses an elaborately pat-
terned and punning style to imagine the lives of artists from a street artist to Emily
Dickinson to her own mother, a painter who died from cancer. The same style is in
play when she turns her devoted attention to humble domestic objects and ordinary,
everyday events; for her, even the apparently mundane is resonant with meaning
and underpinned by the fundamental rhythms of experience. Conversely, in a poem
like “Chernobyl” (1989), Salter uses a storybook opening (“Once upon a time / The
word alone was scary”) and a singsong style to describe grim events and so intimates
how soon even a major nuclear disaster is absorbed into a larger narrative, becomes
part of old tales and talking. Salter is an enormously eclectic poet, using a wide
variety of formal effects to emphasize the multiplicity, the tonal variety of human
experience. So, in “Elegies for Etsuko” (1989), the suicide of a friend becomes the
occasion for rehearsing just how various the responses of even one person to such a
traumatic event can be and just how many perspectives and forms, ranging from the
villanelle to free verse, need to be deployed to rehearse that variety.
The poetry of Molly Peacock, as collections such as And Live Apart (1980) show,
tends more toward narrative than that of Salter or, for that matter, Finch. Influenced
by the confessionalism of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath as well as the strict formalism
of Elizabeth Bishop, Peacock uses novelistic elements as well as rhyme and syllabic
count to expose and explore the most intimate areas of her life. Abusive family
relationships, female sexuality, marriage, abortion, and divorce are among the
recurring subjects in her work. And, as she sees it, traditional forms are a vital means
of self-revelation. They supply what she has called “happy barriers”; working out the
poetic “puzzles” posed by different forms has been an enabling activity for her,
providing imaginative escape and emotional sanctuary. So, in “Say You Love Me”
(1989), Peacock deploys terza rima as a frame for portraying the drunkenly abusive
behavior of her father and his oppressive demands for affection and obedience.
The family is revealed, in the elaborate patterning of the lines of this poem, to be an
equally elaborate network of blame and dependence, a system of collusion and
constraint that isolates each member of the family from the other members and
from the wider community. “There was no world out there /,” she recalls, “so, we
remained completely alone.” The poetry of Rachel Hadas and Gjertrud Schnackenberg
is less immediately personal and more openly intertextual than this. Hadas has aGGray_c05.indd 625ray_c 05 .indd 625 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM